Promoting Awareness on Sustainable Behavior Through an AR-Based Art Gallery

This paper presents “Augmented Gallery”, an art gallery in the form of a networked, AR-based, audio-visual system, which was devised to convey the visitors a clear message about the urgency of taking action to address environmental threats such as pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. The system was designed to both entertain and educate the visitors, empowering them to understand how unsustainable behaviours may affect our lives in the future and emphasize the need to take relevant actions for building a more environmentally sustainable world. Augmented Gallery consists of an AR app running on networked smartphones used by visitors. The app displays, at visual and auditory level, scenes representing various healthy environments as well as, via user interactions, their counterpart affected by the consequences of an unaddressed climate change and unsustainable human behaviour, exposing predictions based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change climate report. A user study was conducted, where the gallery was evaluated during two public events. The results showed that opinions about Augmented Gallery were generally very positive. Furthermore, visitors admitted that attending the gallery increased their awareness on environmental issues and their consequences on the planet.