Dream Garden: Exploring Location-Based, Collaboratively-Created Augmented Reality Spaces

We introduce Dream Garden, an augmented reality application (AR) that lets people place 3D flowers into the physical world to build a collaborative location-based garden. Despite the potential for connecting strangers in the digital realm, current research has not explored location-based augmented reality experiences that enable strangers to connect by building artifacts collaboratively. We explore this by creating an AR digital community garden deployed in a specific location. Anyone with the proper app can access and see the flowers previously planted by strangers, as well as plant their own flowers to grow the garden. We evaluated this app with 10 participants, with 5 visiting the digital garden more than once, to evaluate their sense of connection to the other participants as each participant added one digital flower to the garden. We found that participants were joyful about building a shared space, were excited about the dynamic nature of the garden, felt a connection to the physical location of the digital garden, and expressed a sense of belonging to a community of strangers but not necessarily an emotional connection.