Augmented Reality — Speculative Energy Futures
Earth Fortunes
Earth Fortunes is a conceived of as an exploratory journey through some of the ways energy systems affect our lives. If you are excited, worried, or unsure about future energy systems, Earth Fortunes allows you to ‘foretell’ the planet’s future using tarot cards outfitted with augmented reality (AR) visualization informed by the climate science and scientific climate modelling.
When activated as a role playing game, the character of the fortune teller can lay out the tarot deck and then point a smart phone at the centre cards to make holographic visualizations appear. They can then use those augmented reality images to racount and bring to life the story of five different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).
The Augmented Reality visualizations linked to the tarot cards were created using the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM), developed by the Joint Global Change Research Institute, and a set of long-term scenarios, otherwise known as the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP), to model possible socio-economic and environmental futures.
Role
Visual Designer & AR Assistant, with artist Wallace Edwards
Tools
Augmented Reality
Data Visualization
GCAM
SSP Scenarios
QR Access
Research-Creation
AR · Smartphone
QR-activated holograms over tarot cards
GCAM data
five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
Role
Visual Designer & AR Assistant, with artist Wallace Edwards
Tools
Smartphone & tablet AR, QR code access, GCAM / SSP data
Focus Areas
Climate Communication, Data Storytelling, Speculative Design, Research-Creation
Overview
Earth Fortunes stages climate futures as a tarot reading: a fortune teller lays out cards, then a smartphone camera activates holographic augmented reality visualizations that narrate five distinct Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, the climate research community's standard scenarios for how the planet's energy systems might unfold. Working as visual designer and AR assistant on the project, alongside artist Wallace Edwards, the contribution shaped how these abstract, model-driven futures became something a stranger could hold in their hands and read like a fortune, rather than something confined to a research paper or a modeling dashboard.
Motivation, Ethos & Inspiration
The project's wager is that climate modeling data, however rigorous, persuades no one until it is translated into a form the body can encounter directly: a card turned over, a hologram blooming out of thin air, a story rather than a spreadsheet. Grounding each pathway in the Global Change Analysis Model developed by the Joint Global Change Research Institute, the work insists that speculative energy futures research does not have to sacrifice scientific rigor to become an experience someone actually wants to sit down for, accessible to anyone with a smartphone rather than gated behind institutional access.
Tools, Skills & Software
Augmented reality visualization built for smartphone and tablet cameras, accessed via QR code, layered over data drawn from the Global Change Analysis Model and Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios. Developed as part of the Just Powers & Speculative Energy Futures Research-Creation Project, with visual design and AR assistance contributed alongside artist Wallace Edwards.
AR Demo
(Scan with any smartphone)
Harriet Fisher
Made with love.