Def. The acquisition of food by hunting, fishing, or the gathering of plant matter from the wild.

Urban foraging is the practice of identifying and collecting the wild foods (think tree nuts, plant roots, mushrooms, and even flowers) growing freely around your city. It might also be one of the easiest ways for consumers to start engaging with larger discussions of environmental land use, food justice, and the effects of climate change.

Foraging

Foraging requires a lot of tools that are bulky and hard to carry around while they may not always offer the necessary information required to accurately recognize and conclude whether the plant is edible or not.

Problem Statement Breakdown:

A pocket guide/ field guide is carried on foraging trips. However, this pocket size book has a very limited database of information that is not transferable to different ecosystems.

A magnifying glass and foraging diary is also required to take on foraging trips that add to the unnecessary bulk.

When a specimen is not identified, it must be carried back to cross reference with an encyclopedia or the net. However, the time taken to do so may kill the specimen and is very time consuming.

An Interactive Foraging Encyclopedia

An AR application that functions as all the tools you need to successfully forage anywhere anytime. No preparations are required, No bulky books, No bulky tools! Also works offline, so you can really go off-grid.

This app recognizes plants with high accuracy so you can reliably feast on your finds while also learning about the natural history of the ecosystems and biodiversity of the area!

Consolidating all the tools you need into your pocket!

AR plant recognition (Field Guide)

• Using 2-4 scans of different plant parts to identify the plant based on shape, size, color & texture from an existing database.

• Uses an offline database of images to identify plants, with increased accuracy by narrowing down based on location.

AR natural history of the location.

• Shows what the area looked like 1000 years ago.

• Informs about native plant species and invasive species.

How to use foraged plants.

Personal foraging digital diary.

Encyclopedia.

Conceptual Feature Breakdown:

Process

Vuforia Model Target Generator

This mechanic requires a 3D model of the real life object that is fed to the Model target generator that creates a database. The trained database is then put into the Unity project that enables it to detect the object when scanned.

Vuforia 3D Object Scanner & Target Database

This mechanic requires a 3D scan of the real life object that is then uploaded to the Vuforia Target manager. This then trains a database that is downloaded and imported to Unity.

AR Foundation

This mechanic is part of the Unity AR Foundation. It detects a ground plane and using a RayCastHit script places an object into the real world.

My Role: All aspects

Concept Development

Background research

UX & Interaction design

AR development in Unity using