Hospitals can be foreboding places, especially for young children visiting for the first time. The Nemours Children’s Hospital were interested in changing that perception the moment their patients entered the building, so kids felt welcomed, energized and uplifted by an awe inspiring display.  

The challenge was to develop a concept that appealed to a broad age range, catered to varying attention spans, and constantly evolved - so returning patients always had something new to experience.

Our concept was the Living Garden, a gesture responsive diorama in which children and their families grow their own plants by nurturing them to health using interactive rain and sunshine. Guests use their bodies to control virtual shadows that interact with the wall, nurturing the fantasy landscape into a blossoming garden.
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These images and descriptions explain some of the many features that helped make this installation one of my most ambitious projects to date.

The Living Garden is one of the largest immersive displays installed in North America. The gesture-controlled installation spans more than 50-feet wide, enabling patients and their families to join in the fun together.
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To start the game, participants direct floating seed pods toward the ground where they  germinate into seedlings. Kids then nurture these young plants into full bloom using their bodies to gather interactive rain and reflect beams of sunshine. The flowers then develop into fruits, providing food for a cast of animated characters.
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The experience has no start or ending - so the game feels continuously interactive. This feature makes it easy for people to stay as long as they want, or to join in whenever they feel like playing. The Living Garden lifts people’s spirits by creating a social experience anyone can participate in.

The scene includes a cast of interactive characters based on ideas generated by the hospital’s Youth Advisory Council during our “Creature Creation” workshop.
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These interactive characters add a sense of fun while helping the game transition to the next stage in the story. For example, when the “Ice Fairy” casts a snowstorm of interactive snowflakes she performs a type of “system reset”. Plants discreetly disappear under a layer of snow, freeing up space for a new generation.

Once the plants reach a certain size, an impish character called the ‘Chromakin’ casts her wand, transforming the children’s virtual silhouettes into flying avatars.  
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Players direct the altitude of their avatar by raising and lowering their arms, moving left and right by shifting the angle of their torso. Flying into a plant knocks it’s fruit to the ground, feeding the hungry creatures down below.

The Living Garden was designed to evolve over time, so the landscape never looks the same to returning patients. We chose an idea that felt like a good fit with the narrative of nurturing a Living Garden - a “DNA system” that mated plant characteristics, so the landscape would evolve automatically.
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By pushing two seeds together, players can produce a ‘child’ seed that contains the combined visual characteristics of its parents. Over time, the character of the landscape gently changes, populated by an infinite variety of sprouting plants.

The plants also needed to have their own personality, so they felt like characters that fitted in with the story.
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Our solution was to make them grow with exaggerated movements, so they squeezed and popped their way into bloom. This had a positive impact on the aesthetic experience, turning a potentially “creepy” transition into a something that made children laugh with joy.

The strong visual style of the Living Garden developed from a series of high fidelity ’what if’ renderings. These imaginative propositions inspired our engineering team to push themselves harder, coming up with solutions that were driven by the desired look and feel.