ROLE & PROCESS

Although the act of recycling is a simple way to reduce one’s carbon footprint, the national recycling rate is 35%, meaning millions of tons of recyclable plastics and packaging end up landfills every year. I wanted to solve this problem as an individual developer and designer.

Using Unity, C#, and the XING java library, I experimented with scanning any barcode on a product package to track these products in AR space. After a few iterations, I got the feature working to the point where the app could recognize the type of packaging for a product.

Looking for a way to incentivize users to recycle, I used a user’s data from scanning barcodes to drive a sim-like environment that grew as the player recycled more products. This formed the basis of a sim-like aquarium, where points earned from recycling could be used to purchase more aquatic life for this aquarium. Correspondingly, this represented how the act of recycling can save real aquatic species.