Nature conservation consciousness through interactivity.

LM3LABS completed an educative project for the Gifu City Science Museum for improving nature consciousness among kids (…and hopefully grownups)

+ The Issue
 The Gifu Museum came to LM3LABS with an issue to solve: “We have a beautiful landscape in the Gifu Prefecture. We want to educate local children on nature protection. All our tries with traditional media like posters, books or movies were not really successful.” Indeed, kids cannot “enter” into the content. Their attention rate is too low. Curators also complained about the huge gap between the museum urban atmosphere and the real nature. It was not clearly mentioned by the curators but we quickly understood that Gifu fishes are no clown fishes, sharks and dolphins but pretty dull animals which are not amazingly attractive to normal people.

 + The Proposition
 We propose to immerse and engage visitors into an experience that would be as close as possible to the “natural” experience. It had to be playful too. We created a 5×5 meter interactive floor, based on Catchyoo and displaying 15 types of local fishes moving at their real pace, acting as they would do in real life. Some fishes swim in bank, others have hectic motions. Each fish type has been carefully reproduced. Instead of using words telling how the species “act” in real life, we just recreated them. Kids can walk on the surface. Fishes try to avoid them as they would do in a river (well, we had to make them friendlier, we are in Japan…). Kids can touch the fishes and their names appear on top of them. Kids can learn names while trying to catch the fishes.

 + The Result
 The installation is a great success and it turned to be the main attraction of the museum. We could not measure scientifically how kids memorise fishes names but with an average 15 mn on the interactive floor, they, for sure, learn more than with posters.