Paper Boat

Paper Boat is an AR game/interactive experience that draws the passerby’s attention to the impact of global warming and rising sea level in coastlines areas, using the elements of play, animation, and scientific data. One of the main issues we face in society in this regard is that we can’t directly see what is happening around us or envision the pace of climate change in our daily lives. This interactive, audiovisual AR project brings visualization to the exceedingly fast-paced melting glaciers, with rising average temperatures, and other global warming data on sea shores.

In this interactive AR game/experience, the player will have to rescue a human character by steering him safely to a paper boat. The game begins with a participant installing the Hoverlay app and then pointing to a manhole cover, through which virtual water comes out and occupies the space. A character and a paper boat emerge on the surface. The experience uses manhole covers located by the seashores, as a narrative thread to visualize in real-time the rise in water levels over the next 100 years, by using augmented reality on an accessible smartphone. This work is a performative exercise in visualizing an inevitable catastrophe that is yet to come.

The Directors

Mathieu Pradat is a filmmaker working in the fields of virtual reality and cinema. Trained as an architect, his practice is rooted in the growing interaction between the virtual and real worlds, as territories carry stories and emotions. He explores both linear and interactive narrative forms. His projects have been selected for numerous festivals, including Mostra di Venezia – Venice Immersive, Cannes Immersive, GIFF (Geneva International Film Festival), B3 (Frankfurt Biennale), and the Locarno Festival La Rotonde. Mathieu Pradat gives classes on AR/VR writing and staging at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and at high schools. He is a 2022 Villa Albertine resident and a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Documentary Lab since 2022. In 2010, he founded La Prairie Productions, an immersive content and film production company. Mathieu Pradat lives in Marseille, is married, and has one child.

Sahar Sajadieh is a computational performance artivist (artist + activist) and theorist. She is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts with a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sahar graduated with a dual BSc–BA degree in Computer Science and Theater from the University of British Columbia and received her Master’s Degree from the Performance Studies program at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. She was previously an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University. Sahar’s research lies at the intersection of computational arts, artificial intelligence, social justice-oriented design, and performance/media theory. She is interested in the creative and critical applications of natural language processing, machine learning, extended reality, and robotics as means of storytelling, poetic expression, and social intervention. For Sahar, art practice is a form of activism, a way to challenge the public’s comfort zone and provoke dialogues about difficult, unspoken issues in society. Her research focuses on making interactive technologies and artificial intelligence more alive and their societal applications more ethical.

General Information

Directors: Mathieu Pradat & Sahar Sajadieh
Story: Mathieu Pradat
Lead Developer: Loïc Vigor
Production Company: La prairie productions
Year of Creation: 2025
Selections: Layers of Place, MIT, Boston, April 7-18, 2025.
Incubated at the MIT Open Doc Lab.
Supported by Agog, MacArthur Foundation, and Ford Foundation Just Films
Developed on Hoverlay by Nicolas Robbe
Minimum Age: None
No dialogue

Technical Information

Format: AR experience running on Hoverlay AR (Android & Ios).
Content: Climate Change, Raising Awareness, Game, Experiential.
Duration: 2 minutes 30 seconds
Number of participants per session: No limit
Equipment: Smartphone
Internet connection

Link to the exhibition : Layers of Place: MIT Augmented Reality Exhibition and via Hoverlay

Contact

mp@laprairie-atelier.fr

Trailer