Healing Nature

The Healing Nature project proposal incorporates the power of images of nature as reassuring environmental elements, through various media into hospital spaces, to support the mental, physical, and spiritual health of the individual and the hospital community. Most artworks in hospitals are traditional murals, paintings, and sculptures, and there is a lack of contemporary interactive work and animations in children's hospital waiting rooms. Thus, the main goal of the project is to create an interactive experience, using augmented reality (AR) with animated content, that will assure a welcoming and calming hospital environment that also provides a soothing and distracting experience for children.

The project’s aims and objectives address innovation and social inclusion issues utilizing a SCREENless format, which is efficient, sustainable, and low cost, whilst incorporating a layered interactive experience, combining murals with animated digital elements, in an augmented reality format. The goal is to design innovative, engaging moving image interventions that encourage children to respond to the space and to each other rather than being passive consumers. Our project promotes the traditional “sensorial” visual quality of handmade techniques while enriching it with contemporary immersive technologies that mix digital animation with real-world elements.

The project aims to enhance social inclusion through the public hospital system, open to everyone, and through workshops about nature, art, animation, and technology for the hospital communities, particularly for some marginalized children, whose contributions and creative outputs will become part of the artworks. The project also includes a research component in the form of patient/viewer questionnaires to evaluate the impact of the artworks. The realization of the project will be summed up in a digital booklet, disseminating the project results at completion, in all partner countries.