The International Garden Festival

N ature interpretation centers are a romantic expression of the desire to understand and experience nature without giving up the comforts of civilization. Advances in digital technologies let us collect and store masses of data about our natural environment, but we are more removed from it than ever. As a society, we find ourselves trading experience-based knowledge for comfort. Interpretation centers attempt to shore up this deficit through visual effects. Following trends in news and entertainment TV, they offer seductive media shows depicting portraits of wildlife busily eating, hunting, cleaning, and so forth—in contrast to the reality where usually nothing much happens. To address this unsatisfying approach, we wanted to experiment with computationally enhanced alternatives. We aimed to be closer to the object of inquiry, both with our technology and our knowledge design. Thanks to support from the International Garden Festival (see the related sidebar), we found an opportunity to design and build such an experimental space. For us, the public garden offers an interesting conditioning of the natural environment. Midway between untouched, pristine land and controlled construction, public gardens are established forms of colonialized wildlife. Following the Linnaean tradition, their labeled trees and classified plants suggest “known” elements and hold no secrets. Paved paths and directional cues prevent accidental disorientation and exposure to uncontrolled spaces. There is no room for questions. We chose to challenge this construction with UNSEEN, an active, outdoor computing system embedded in the gardens and capable of operating throughout the summer-long festival, seven days a week, from dawn till dusk. We designed our system to formulate hypotheses on the environment it observed. We aimed to make visitors unfamiliar with life forms they might believe to know. In this article, we describe the conception, implementation, and evaluation of a knowledge-sharing system for outdoor spaces. Like a nature interpretation center, our fully automated, machine vision-based outdoor installation shows visitors interesting facts about the area they are visiting. Unlike such centers, our installation questions factual knowledge and takes interpretive liberties. UNSEEN invites visitors to reconsider their preconceptions about wildlife.