People in
the system
Children
Parents
Design team
Animals
Donors
Communities
Venue management
WWF India
Organizers
Admins
Developers
Faculty
Installation Team
Moderators
Logistics team
Teachers
Docent
Outreach
Staff
ECOSYSTEM MAPPING
Children often learn about wildlife through books, videos and facts, with limited opportunities to experience animal behaviour and ecological relationships.
PROBLEM
Into the Wild is an immersive, gesture-based wildlife learning experience that helps children explore biomes, observe animal behaviour, capture discoveries and learn through interactive storytelling.
SOLUTION
Children have limited opportunities to experience and understand wildlife.
Enabling children to experience and understand wildlife through immersive, hands-on exploration.
Context
At a Glance
01. Interact Through Gestures
Children use simple mid-air gestures to observe, listen to, and capture wildlife, making exploration an active experience.
02. Discover & Learn
Children observe animal behaviour, capture discoveries, and uncover facts through interactive storytelling and Ella, their wildlife guide(VUI).
DEMO VIDEO
Real life experiences
Pets, insects, birds, parks, farms and zoos provide direct encounters with animals and their behaviour.
https://sentientmedia.org/how-we-introduce-animals-to-children/
Books
The animal first exists as a physical object that can be touched, held and carried.
Youtube
Digital media introduces animals as entertaining characters with voices, emotions and human-like behaviour.
Examples: Cocomelon, BabyBus, Peppa Pig, Wild Kratts, National Geographic Kids.
The animal first exists as a physical object that can be touched, held and carried.
TOYS
Research
How are children introduced to animals?
Environmental Learning Ladder
See
Experience
Explore
Act
1
2
3
4
5
Know
Children first learn environmental concepts through textbooks, EVS/science lessons, pictures, stories and vocabulary.
Our intervention sits between EXPERIENCE and EXPLORE, deepening the child’s engagement with wildlife before action.
They encounter nature through videos, documentaries, images, school gardens, zoos and demonstrations.
Nature walks, field trips, birdwatching, nature camps
Investigate through projects, experiments, biodiversity registers, workshops, games and hands-on activities.
Eco-club activities, campaigns, conservation projects, waste reduction, planting and sustainable everyday practices.
Children learn to recognise animals. They rarely get to explore the behaviours, adaptations and environmental relationships that shape their lives.
Environmental learning is a way of understanding a place through direct experience, observation, and inquiry. It helps children notice relationships, changes, and patterns in the environment rather than simply learning environmental facts.
The Gap
Environmental Learning
The child observes, forms a rule, tests it, and changes their behaviour.
The risk: Outdoor experiences without structure may leave little learning behind.
The environment as content: names, definitions, and facts learned for recall.
The risk: Knowing the terms without truly observing or understanding the environment.
Moving Toward Learning in and for the Environment
Moving Away From Learning About the Environment
These are not stages; they overlap and happen together. For children aged 7–12, the difference is not how much they learn, but how much of the animal comes through.
Real-world
encounters
High in context understanding the real world behaviour of the animal may not be in the natural habitat.
Toys
Textbook lessons/poems/stories about animals with activities and multimedia aids.
Visual and emotion driven experience of Animal traits.
Held, Carried and Felt.
The movement of the animal is in the child’s control.
Storybooks +
Formal Curriculums
Screens
How is this gap covered?
LEARNING PATTERN
Organisations Working on Wildlife & Nature Education
Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF)
Nature Classrooms
Nature camps and school-based learning
Focus: ecological observation & connection with nature
Focus: biodiversity awareness & environmental learning
Wild Wisdom Global Challenge
Mission Prakriti
WWF - India
Focus: biodiversity awareness & environmental learning
Wild Wisdom Global Challenge
Mission Prakriti
Bombay Natural History Society
Teacher training and learning resources
Environmental learning initiatives
Focus: conservation education
Wildlife Conservation Trust
Old enough to understand simple ecological relationships, and highly responsive to play, imagination, role-play, and embodied discovery.
Children at this stage are increasingly able to:
Understand cause and effect
Recognise patterns in animal behaviour
Develop early ecological reasoning
Who We’re Designing For
Kids
7-12yrs
TARGET USERS
Interviewing Professional
01
Programme Manager, Education and Public Engagement
Nature Conservation Classroom
She works on connecting people with nature. she believes in making people notice what is already around them.
Nature on Campus — a programme for college students
Campus Biodiversity Registers — students observe, document and record the biodiversity on their own campus
Sees scope to link this with existing undergraduate nature clubs
Devica Ranade
02
They are working on One Planet Academy WWF- a India’s digital environmental learning platform, offering interactive resources that help children explore topics around biodiversity, climate, and sustainable living.
These are a few feedbacks we received during the meeting:
Make human actions and their effects on ecosystems visible.
Help children notice local ecosystems and urban wildlife.
Encourage children to observe, capture, and collect evidence.
“
Rahul Sunderajan
Senior Education Officer
World Wildlife Fund
Surabhi Deshpande
PRIMARY RESEARCH
03
She is working on Early Bird Programme- encourages children to
connect with nature through hands-on activities and immersive
learning experiences.It nurtures curiosity, environmental awareness,
and a lasting connection with the natural world.
These are a few feedbacks we received during the meeting:
Connect children with everyday nature and urban wildlife.
Encourage curiosity, hands-on learning and independent discovery.
Use immersive indoor experiences to prepare children for outdoor exploration.
Senior Project Assistant, Education
& Public Engagement
Nature Conservation Classroom
Amruta Padgaonkar
Kolb Experiential Learning
Since our experience is designed as learning through interaction, we use Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle as a foundation for shaping the experience.
It guides us to design an interaction where children experience, observe, make sense of what they encounter, and experiment through their actions.
1.
The child encounters an animal and experiences the environment through sight, sound, and movement.
2.
The child notices the animal’s response and wonders why it reacted that way.
3.
The child connects the experience to animal behaviour and ecological relationships.
4.
The child changes their action and observes how the animal or ecosystem responds.
LEARNING MODEL
Children need to observe, question, and record what they encounter for wildlife experiences to become meaningful learning.
Connecting with local species and everyday ecosystems makes nature more relatable and accessible to children.
Children should understand how their actions influence wildlife, building empathy and a sense of responsibility towards nature.
1
2
3
Active Observation
Familiar Environments
Learning Through Behaviour
MAIN INSIGHT
Children build a deeper connection with nature when they actively observe, explore, and understand the world around them.
KEY INSIGHTS
Findings
create an immersive space where children can explore wildlife, observe animal behaviour, and discover ecological relationships through movement, gestures, and sensory interaction?
HOW MIGHT WE
Design Brief
To create an immersive, gesture-based wildlife learning experience for children aged 7–12, enabling them to explore and interact with virtual wildlife, and understand animal behaviour and ecosystems through playful, experiential learning.
Initial Ideations of the experience flow
P5Js explorations
Prototyping the experience
Ideation
Final code of the experience with Antigravity
After several iterations with P5Js & VSCode
Gesture Mapping
Experience Flow
Interaction & System Behaviour Matrix
Interaction Principle
Voice supports the child when needed, without interrupting their exploration.
Conversation Flow
Tone of Voice
FRIEND
AUTHORITY
SERIOUS
PLAYFUL
RELIABLE
RISK-TAKING
CLASSIC
CONTEMPORARY
FORMAL
INCLUSIVE
Voice User Interface
Ella is a friendly wildlife guide who helps children in Into the Wild. She gives instructions, shares animal facts, and encourages exploration.
Meet Ella — Your Jungle Guide
What role does voice play?
Through voice interactions, she helps children make sense of their discoveries without interrupting their exploration.
What triggers the VUI?
“OK” gesture calls Ella.
What does Ella do?
Gives short contextual prompts
Helps users understand gesture
Intervenes when the user needs help
Appears when “OK” gesture is used
Encourages children to explore
Portable Screen
Floor Graphics
Depth Camera
The set up
Biome landing screen
Ella - VUI
Animal Interaction
Biome selection
Journal
Players get a tooltip along with visual cues to start interacting and observing with biome.
Ella is a companion who helps player every time there is inactivity or failure is registering a gesture.
After exploring a biome, player can decide to stay with the same or chose different biome.
Players can revisit their interactions, captured photos with animal and flip through pages.
Ella can be called at any time using designated gesture.
Player can chose from various gestures to interact with animals. Every gesture from the right side gesture bar has certain reaction from the chosen animal.
Onboarding flow
Player detection
Biome selection
Role selection
Multiplayer player detection
Floor ring lights up along with ring on screen to show status of player being detected.
Player can chose from various biome options such as snowy, swamp, ocean or dessert.
A single player mode allows player to chose between roles of human, bird and bee to experience wilderness differently.
A single player mode allows player to chose between roles of human, bird and bee to experience wilderness differently.
Animal interaction flow
Final Design
An immersive, gesture-based wildlife experience where children explore biomes and interact with virtual animals, guided by Ella, a voice-based virtual guide.
User Testing
Floor Mapping
Gesture Testing
User testing
Screen
Additional features
Study flora with Ella
Fauna in detail
Urban biome
Kids can explore additional facets of animal lives such as migration, what and how they eat along with their night time behaviour.
Why stop at only animals when you can study plants and trees around them as well in detail.
Animal/bird anatomy can be studied multimodally.
Wildlife is not only about whats in the jungle but also about whats around your house and that can be explore through urban biome.
Future Scope
AI-assisted development
Design-to-code translation
Rapid iteration
Deployment & testing
I learned that the gap between seeing nature and caring about it is not filled by more information, but by meaningful experiences.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
SKILLS DEVELOPED
01
Designing Through Embodied Interaction
03
Designing for Diverse Learners
02
Making Learning Experiential
04
Prototyping Multimodal Experiences
Learning Outcomes
GUIDED BY
Dr. Mamata N Rao | Prof. Athul Dinesh
MODULE
Multimodal Interactions
Overview
INDUSTRY
Edu-tech, Experiential Learning, Interaction Design
CONTRIBUTORS
Anurag, Sneha K, Vedant
TOOLS
Figma · Claude Code · ChatGPT · Gemini · Premiere Pro · Antigravity · VS Code · p5.js
DURATION
2 weeks
PROJECT TYPE
Academic project
ROLE
UX/UI Design, Prototyping,
Vibe Coding
“The wild is everywhere”
Into the Wild — Discovering nature through immersive, playful exploration.
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AI-Powered Design Workspace.
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