This Interactive AR artwork was created as part of MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Layers of Place Collective. It was exhibited at MIT campus in April 2025 and was selected to be exhibited at SXSW festival in Austin, TX, in March 2026.
Paper Boat is a site-specific, interactive augmented reality artwork that stages the climate crisis as an embodied, playable, and performative experience. Confronting the invisibility of sea-level rise, the work overlays rising water, melting glaciers, and plastic waste onto the familiar landscape of Austin. Participants become active spect-actors, navigating a human figure through flooding streets and debris toward a paper boat as the environment slowly submerges around them. Racing against time, players must rescue the figure before the area is overtaken by water. Paper Boat challenges participants to confront global warming not as a distant future, but as a lived, urgent reality.
Paper Boat
Co-created by: Sahar Sajadieh & Mathieu Pradat *
Interaction Design and Interactive Narrative: Sahar Sajadieh & Mathieu Pradat *
Concept: Mathieu Pradat
Game Development: Loïc Vigor
AI Developer–Designer: Sahar Sajadieh
Year of Creation: 2025
Selections:
Layers of Place Public AR Art Exhibition, MIT, Cambridge, MA (2025)
SXSW, Austin, TX (2026)
Incubated at: the MIT Open Documentary Lab
Supported by: Agog; MacArthur Foundation; Ford Foundation Just Films
Funds administered by: La Prairie Productions
* Equal Contribution
Technical Information
Developed on: Hoverlay AR (AR platform founded by Nicolas Robbe)
Format: AR interactive art experience running on Hoverlay AR (Android & iOS)
Software Applications: Hoverlay, Unity, Stable Diffusion, Python
Content: Climate crisis; awareness-raising; rising sea levels; augmented reality art; interactive public artwork; experiential game art; serious games
Number of participants per session: No limit
Equipment: Smartphone or tablet (iOS or Android), internet connection
Special thanks to Nicolas Robbe for his generosity with his time and support in developing this project, and to Sarah Wolozin and Akmyrat Tuyliyev for their leadership and support in realizing and showcasing this work across multiple festivals as part of the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Layers of Place collective AR exhibition.