Follow Your Phone to the Westwood Greenway

Green Space, Park Access, and Trees

West LA

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative

Excessive smartphone use can impair physical, mental, and social well-being, and disrupt sleep and academic performance. It also reduces opportunities for use of imagination, exercise, and outdoor exploration. Human well-being requires green spaces. Time in nature can reduce stress and improve learning ability, focus, emotional stability, and mental health. But our LA parks need our help to restore their biodiversity, which is essential for enhancing human health and supporting a sustainable environment. LA designated 37 species as indicators of habitat quality. According to the 2022 Westwood Greenway Biodiversity Index, none of these species had been spotted by volunteers gathering data with the iNaturalist app. We can solve both with productive use of smartphones via augmented reality (AR)-which can increase learning attention by 31% and motivation by 14%. We propose an AR smart phone application for the Westwood Greenway to entice digital natives outdoors to PLAY, LEARN, and LIVE.

Westwood Greenway provides green space where visitors can connect with nature. It models the benefits of sustainable practices and provides outdoor space for hands-on education, increased biodiversity, and public benefit. Our augmented reality (AR) project will encourage residents to visit the habitat more often, spend more time creatively engaged, and interact with content we will provide onsite. By overlaying interactive digital content onto the natural environment, to be visualized through any smartphone, AR will increase activities for imagination and exploration. It will captivate visitors' attention and curiosity about sustainable spaces and will encourage the restoration of LA's biodiversity. Visitors will see the wonder and complexity of the local native habitat as our virtual simulations bring the ecosystem to life. With the magic of AR, every visitor can virtually witness tiny sleeping bees in the Apricot Mallow, majestic Mourning Cloak butterflies, and the camouflaged Lesser Goldfinch. In addition, they can view how the land will grow healthier as it attracts species identified by our city as indicators of biodiversity and habitat quality. We will enable users to viscerally witness pollination, nutrient cycling, water filtration, and climate regulation. Through compelling activities, visitors will gain empathy and be inspired to take an interest in the world around them; and students contributing to the AR will be better prepared for careers in digital media.

Imagine a world where we all live in harmony with the Earth and each other-LA County with people outdoors enjoying pockets of thriving biodiverse ecosystems. FOLLOW YOUR PHONE directly impacts residents on the west side, but the ripple effect will be felt countywide. Every resident inspired to start a native garden will inspire neighbors, friends, and family to start their own, and they will inspire others. The Greenway's living model, plus our self-guided AR tour touting the benefits of restoring the ecosystem, entice people outdoors and make a compelling plea to plant native flora. In addition, we'll be teaching student artists how to prepare 3D artwork for AR, a valuable skill, thereby supporting them in building their potential digital media careers. FOLLOW YOUR PHONE, designed for the Westwood Greenway, can be repurposed and adapted for other native gardens: the Thomas Payne garden tours, botanical gardens throughout LA County, and beyond.

iNaturalist is an app that helps people identify plants and animals. Users are creating research-quality data that can be used to discover if any of the 37 indicator species have moved into the Greenway. FOLLOW MY PHONE can be integrated with iNaturalist to make data capture easier and to encourage more data collection. To date, there have been 1000 visitors to the Greenway. As the unhoused situation improves and the property owner, LA Sanitation, becomes comfortable opening more days to the public, we anticipate that AR will entice many more visitors, increase time at the site, and help visitors to retain learnings better. We'll track our success through the number of app downloads, total time on the app, and what content the visitors spend the most time exploring. This will measure the impact our app will have on getting people outside, into nature, and onto the Greenway. We can directly quantify the number of students using this opportunity to contribute 3D artwork.

Westwood Greenway will be the host location for the augmented reality experience. It is located at the Westwood/Rancho Park metro station along the E Line to Santa Monica and is owned by LA Sanitation. However, it is managed by the 501c3 Westwood Greenway Initiative's (WGI) 8-member board. Impact Immersive will be responsible for 100% of the budgeting, production, and development of the AR application, but we will rely heavily on WGI's board members for their habitat expertise in regard to content creation. Impact Immersive will make all final decisions about how much information we can include and the app functionality. We will look to Charles, Jonathan, and Annette (mentioned #11) for direction in regard to which flora attracts which fauna and details about how the ecosystem functions.