Tianmu
#AI #AR #Product Design
A series of products combine AR technique, AI object recognition, “electronica fence” and business model to achieve sustainable development of pasture and prevent desertification
Social innovation, Secondary research, Programming, Physical prototyping, AR interface design
MY ROLE
Yawen Xiao (UX designer & programmer), Zhuoran Zhang (UX designer & project manager), Feihong Huang (Product designer)
TEAM
DURATION
8 weeks
Project Overview
Tianmu combines the AR technique, AI object recognition, the product “electronic fence” and a business model to promote a grazing method, called “rotation grazing”, which is the most environmentally-friendly grazing method to achieve sustainable development of pasture and prevent desertification.
Brief
How might we promote “rotation grazing” to prevent desertification in China and increase herdsmen's income?
Problem
Help herdsmen perform “rotation grazing” more scientifically via AR technique, AI object recognition, electronic fence and business model.
Solution
Why do we want to work on desertification?
No one could forget the sandstorm that happened on March 14, 2021, in Beijing. The thick dust turned the sky yellow and the sun blue. People felt it hard to breathe and in the picture, we can find that it is hard to distinguish CCTV Headquarters from the yellow dust.
Worldwide desertification
A wide range of people are affected by desertification in the world.
Secondary research
What causes desertification in China?
Why is overgrazing one of the serious causes of desertification in China?
We can find the reasons in the map. From the map, we can see most of the desertification area in China was pastures. Some grasslands in northwest China are used as pastures, and unfortunately, because of overgrazing, these grasslands finally become desertification area.
The rapid population growth causes rapid meat needs and it leads to the overgrazing problem at last.
Changes in China land system
Since 2000, mountain grazing prohibition bans have been implemented nationwide as an extreme ecological protection measure. At that time, farmers who made a living by grazing could not accept it. The research on herdsmen's grazing showed that more than 70% of herdsmen used illegal grazing after the ban.
Especially since the Reform, after the contract of grassland to households, in the market economy system, in order to pursue economic interests, the degree of grassland overload continues to increase.
Government and herdsman value proposition analysis of banning grazing
From the picture, it is clear to tell that both herdsmen and government want to ensure herdsmen's income. However the government cares more about establishing a scientific livestock policy and maintaining sustainable development. The herdsmen want to keep their nomadic lifestyle and keep good meat quality. Banning grazing and forcing herdsmen to enclose livestock make them give up their nomadic lifestyle and influence the meat quality. That’s why the banning issue doesn’t work.
Popular grazing method in China
Rotational grazing is the best grazing method. However, this method also has some limitations, it is hard to apply widely in China. Rotational grazing requires very precise parameters, such as stocking rate, grazing time, grazing frequency, etc., to determine the divided area. For general farmers, only rough estimations can be carried out, and it is difficult to determine accurate parameters, so this grazing method is difficult to popularize. Therefore, we decided to create a product to solve the problem and apply this scientific grazing method in the wild.
Current herdsman grazing journey
Product design
Design goals
System map
The system map shows the structure and the function of our products and how they connect to help the government, herdsmen and the citizens in city to prevent dersertification, earn more money with less effort and experience pasture tourism.
AR system
Why choose the AR technique?
Considering that we need to solve multiple complicated problems, such as livestock health, navigation function, and pasture management in the project, we choose to use the AR technique since it is more visualized and effective in a pasture environment compared to apps and websites.
We realized Tianmu, as a social innovation project, has been hard to come true in recent years. But with the development of technology, AR technology can be affordable for common people. With the financial and technical support of the government, Tianmu can be applied to real-life situations one day.
Electronic fencing design
Scene rendering
Monitoring camera
(AI object recognition)
Prototyping
I used p5.js and ml5.js which is a machine learning framework for my prototyping. The cameras capture the images in real-time and upload them to the trained machine learning algorithm which can detect the sheep. After the algorithm’s analysis, the analyzed data will be uploaded to the app and AR system. If there are livestock out of the fence, the herdsmen will receive a warning both on their AR screens and mobile app.
Soil thermometer
(Detect temperature and humidity)
The soil thermometer is on the bottom of the electronic fencing which contains a sensor to detect the humidity and temperature of the soil. We used Arduino to simulate how the thermometer detects humidity and temperature. The data will be uploaded to the cloud, and if there is any abnormality in the data, the ar glasses or app will directly remind the herdsmen to take action.
AR interface
Notification - health
If livestock gets ill, herdsmen can get timely notification including which livestock get ill and what are their health issues. Also, herdsmen can choose to make an appointment immediately by pressing the button below.
GPS
AR navigation navigates herdsmen to any destination.
Notification - others
Remind herdsmen if they have new guests’ orders and their daily tasks. Warn herdsmen if their livestock is out of the fence.
Government guidance
Real-life training
AR glasses can automatically know herdsmen are trying to install the electronic fence since it can detect the surrounding object. It will ask whether they want to enable video guidance and if they choose yes, they can easily install the electronic fence by following the steps.
Device installation instructuion
Pasture tourism management
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