Zoe - Prepare your scene

Overview - Sustainable Farming

Creating the environment

Working with Interactive Objects

Programming with Interactions

Guiding the user through the experience

Do you know emerging or ancient sustainable ways of planting?

Introduce the 3 sisters system and ask students to research about it. 

Where does it come from?
Are there different versions of it?

Each group of students or each student does a presentation about what he/she found and what they thought was most interesting to them and why. Q&A

Ask students to imagine an experience explaining / showcasing the 3 sisters system. 

Constrain: there is a drawing somewhere in the experience as a diagram that users can base themselves on.

-> outcome of this step is an Interactive Experience Poster and a diagram about the 3 sisters

Create necessary assets for the experience: the diagram will be part of the experience, and if students are comfortable creating 3d models (using Google Blocks or any other) they can also model their own assets. Otherwise we provide them inside the package.

Place assets, create the scene with the basic environment

Invite students to test their experience at every significant step in order to adjust interactions, position of assets, sounds etc. Check on every group the progress and be a user tester for them so they can improve their creations.

At some point also make other groups test the other’s experiences and give feedback. Make sure feedback is constructive always mentioning positive points and suggesting improvements.

Repeat the 3 sub-processes until the experience is polished.

As soon as the experience is done it is time for a larger audience to live it.

You can invite the whole classroom to test their creations. 

Important here is that other groups learn about sustainable farming by playing the different experiences.

If necessary you can evaluate what students learned from other groups creations, as a final wrap-up on the different topics that were raised during the creation and testing of the experiences. For example you can ask them about the three sisters, about how plants work and help each other, about natural systems in general, if they were inspired to plant their own food...

Zoe_SustainableFarming.unitypackage.zip

"Zoe for Unity" is a no-code plugin allowing you to create interactive VR experiences. In this tutorial we are going to reproduce an ancient and sustainable planting system called the “Three Sisters”. 

Scenario:  You find yourself in an abandoned farm. Some objects and structures of a native tribe remain there. You see a sign with a diagram called “The Legend of the three sisters” and a box on a wooden bench . As you discover what is inside the box you realise you will have to wake up the spirit of the three sisters by reproducing an ancient system of planting that will bring back life to your farm.

Creating a Sustainable Farming Training Experience with Zoe 

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Placing the terrain

Lights

Creating the setup

Creating plants with their growing phases

Adding information

Adding instructions

Grouping assets

Creating the environment for the Sustainable Farming Experience. 

If you opened the SustainableFarmingSet scene you can skip steps 1 to 3.

If you are starting from scratch and already have an empty scene open the first thing to do is to add a ground. 

Note: to create a scene simply go to File > New Scene.

We have created a Unity Terrain Prefab that you can directly use. Inside the ‘Prefabs’ folder of the tutorial find the Terrain and drag it inside your Hierarchy window. You do not need to place it as it has the position already set in the prefab.

This is how the terrain looks like from far away in the Scene View:

Terrain in the Scene View

Now let’s change the lighting of the scene to match with the sandy shades of the terrain. Go to Window > Rendering > Lighting Settings. 

You will be able to change the Skybox material of the scene. The Skybox is like a box around your scene, drawing the sky and the ground. Change the material by the one provided with the tutorial under SustainableFarm>Materials, called “Sky”. You can close the Lighting Settings window.

Then let’s also change the light in the scene. Find in your Hierarchy window the ‘Directional Light’. We recommend the following position and settings to go with the environment: 

 Feel free to adjust the color and the intensity to your preferences. 

Lighting Settings

Lighting Settings - Skybox

Directional Light settings

Let’s now place our models inside this terrain. Also inside the ‘Prefabs’ folder you can find the following elements:

Drag the prefabs into your Hierarchy and use the 'Move' arrows of your scene window to place them. You can do the layout you want, this is the setup we suggest:

 Now let’s add smaller objects. Inside the same folder select the following elements:

Using again the 'Move' arrows, place the elements as follows:

 Finally add the ‘Soil_heap’ prefab on top of the ‘Soil_flat’, this is where plants will be growing from:

You could always do a different layout, however we recommend to place the seeds close to the soil so the user does not do too many back and forth movements for planting the seeds. 

Scene Setup

Scene setup detail

Seeds

Heap of soil

 Once you have the main elements placed it's time to place the plants: the corn, the beans and the squash. Each plant will have three different 3D models for each of their growing phases and at the end we will add the crops.

First drag the following elements inside your scene:

Place the corn in the middle of the heap of soil, then place the bean a bit offset to the outside and the squash even further on the slope of the little heap of soil:

Now let’s place the 3D models for the other phases, drag the remaining prefabs of the plants inside your scene. Put them on top of the first one you just placed. It should look like the image below, we will add the crops later  :

Plants placement

Final phases placement

 Let’s now create some text bubbles with information about the three plants and how they work together.

Drag the ‘SpeechBubble’ prefab inside your scene and rename it into ‘CornText’ 

 In the Hierarchy expand it, select the Text element and inside the inspector write information about the corn:

Note:  to wrap the text press Enter to add a new line of words. 

In the Scene view adapt the size of the Bubble and the position of the Tail accordingly. Place the bubble over the corresponding plant phase, for example this one will appear at the same time the corn grows to indicate the next step is to plant the beans:

Duplicate the bubble as many times as needed/wanted and write the different information you want to display. Here are some ideas:

Corn provides a natural structure for beans to grow.

Beans pull nitrogen naturally from the air and bring it to the soil to feed the other plants.

By growing around the corn bean stalks also provide stability.

Squash leaves provide shade keeping the soil moist and weed-free.

These are the " Three Sisters" providing soil fertility and healthy food.

You can adjust the final placement later on, when all plants will be properly displayed.

Text bubble prefab structure

Text settings

Instruction above soil

Texts about the other plants

A user in an immersive experience needs to be guided in order to know what to do. So we will also create a few instructions using the same 'Speech Bubble'.

Duplicate again one of the bubbles (twice). Rename them 'SoilInstruction' and 'CornInstruction', for example, then write the following instructions:

Start by making a heap of soil (with the shovel)

You can also change the material of the bubble and the tail so that instructions have a different color than the information texts:

You can add more instructions if you feel the user needs to be guided further in the experience. You can also write them differently if you want. 

Different material for text bubble

Instruction for using the shovel

Now that most assets are placed, we are going to group them to help organise our interactions. 

Right-click in the Hierarchy and create an Empty Game Object:

Name it 'CornPlant'. Use the 'Move' arrows to place it at the bottom of the corn plant phase assets, in the middle of the heap of soil:  

 In the Hierarchy, drag all three phases of the corn plant inside, as if inside a folder:

 Do the same for the bean and the squash plant.

Then inside each plant select the three phases and deactivate them in the Inspector window to hide them as they will only appear later in the experience.

Group also the texts under a ‘Texts’ GameObject and hide them individually as we are going to show them only when needed during the experience:

Create empty object

Empty object placement

Corn phases grouping

Uncheck an object to deactivate it.

Texts grouping

Educators note: the 'Three Sisters' is a native American ancient system of planting. The assets we provide are inspired from Iroquois tribes. Students can research about Iroquois villages and try to reproduce a setup they like.  

Now is a good moment to ask students to research about the Three Sisters planting system. There are various layouts for placing the seeds/plants, the assets we provide are designed for the most common one but students could try to implement another one if they want. 

Having done some research around the planting system, ask students to write 3-4 interesting facts about the plants’ synchronized actions, each one summarized in one sentence.

Creating the environment

1. Placing the terrain

2. Lights

3. Creating the setup

4. Creating plants with their growing phases

5. Adding information

6. Adding instructions

7. Grouping assets

Complete this tutorial