Gothenburg Botanical Garden

Gothenburg Botanical Garden turned 100 in 2023, and while the app hasn't been around for quite that long, it is one of OnSpotStory's oldest. Version 1.0 was launched on the App Store and Google Play in 2016, and it has evolved a great deal since then, in both content and features. In summer 2023, the garden launched Träd in i Botaniska ("Step into the Botanical Garden") – a guided walk with augmented reality.

Challenge

Gothenburg Botanical Garden, in Sweden's second-largest city on the west coast, opened in 1923 as part of the city's great jubilee exhibition, which also saw the opening of the Liseberg amusement park, the Gothenburg Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. With more than 630,000 visitors a year, it is constantly evolving. Its mission is to protect and work with the diversity of the plant world. The garden is an important infrastructure for research, a place where children learn about nature, and where everyone can enjoy plants from every corner of the globe in beautifully composed garden rooms.

There are signs throughout the garden and the plants are labelled, but to complement guided tours and give visitors more information in both Swedish and English, the garden decided in 2016 to create an app with self-guided tours. Visitors can choose between the full Botaniska runt ("Around the Botanical Garden"), Vandra i det vilda ("Walk on the wild side"), a shorter tour of the wildest parts of the garden, and Hälsostigen ("the Health Trail"), which focuses on the importance of nature for our health.

The garden was able to stay open during the pandemic, broke visitor records and welcomed many first-time visitors. Afterwards, it wanted to create an engaging walk for children and families – a kind of treasure hunt that would increase knowledge of biodiversity in a fun way.

Solution

Together with the garden, we discussed different ideas and possibilities and finally settled on a concept combining quizzes, points and augmented reality. The garden put together a project group of educators and communicators who developed the tree theme and the content for the walk's eleven stops.

An AR experience was then created for each stop, triggered when visitors scan a tree symbol on site. The phone's camera then shows, for example, an animated film, a 3D object or a Norse god "on top of reality". And it pays to pay attention, because a quiz question follows.

Finding the AR experience and answering correctly are rewarded with points in the form of tree rings. Users start as a little seedling and can grow into a big tree. At the end of the walk, they can see their result and share it on social media.

The garden produced all the content itself – 2D animations, 3D objects and green-screen films. We acted as a sounding board and provided support on formats and problem-solving throughout the project. We also adapted both the AR and the gamification modules to meet the garden's wishes on design and function.

It has been an incredibly rewarding process for us to explore the tools we can now use to make the stories of plants accessible, with the help of so many different kinds of media. AR is a playful and educational way of storytelling that we want to keep using in the future – not least combined with gamification.

Ellinor Smederöd, Digital Communicator, Gothenburg Botanical Garden