Immersive Futures - AI, Space Plants and the Next Generation of Food

This interactive experience allows the audience (ages 8+) to engage with AI characters who are knowledgeable about the specific plants and techniques that might be used to grow those plants in space. We will create a structured lesson that provides a knowledgeable specialist (the AI character) to aid teachers in delivering information and engagements to support student learning.

Using Unreal Engine, the team at Flinders Games Research Lab and the Void motion capture studio have partnered with the ARC's Plants4Space project to develop a virtual space station designed to support long-term human habitation through botany. For Science Week, we propose to present a version of this project in the ILA Lightroom studio space, inviting school groups through during two days and hosting two evening activities. Characters powered by bespoke AI will be able to engage directly with audience members, posing and answering questions about growing plants in space.

We are designing the characters in Plants for Space to be capable of answering live questions from school kids who are learning about the science of botany in space. We will use the model for our AI characters from 'Welcome to the Cave' so that the target audience for P4S (students ages 12-18) will be able to have a more engaging, directly interactive experience with the content.

In a wide-ranging literature review of studies of AI used for education, Alam and Windiarti summarise, ‘Previous research has shown that AI can significantly improve learning effectiveness through content adaptation and personalized instant feedback’ (Alam & Windiarti 2025). Beauchamp and Kennewell (2010) build on their previous body of research on interactivity in the classroom, demonstrating that providing interactive experiences does not necessarily yield high impact outcomes. They write, ‘This suggests that expert orchestration of resources is the key factor in converting interactions into learning, and that investigating how technology can be harnessed to facilitate orchestration by teachers and learners will guide teachers’ efforts to improve learning through the use of ICT [interactive classroom technologies]’. These experiences must be carefully crafted to meet learning outcomes, so our research on the South Australian curricula for the age group in question has been applied to a specific lesson plan.

Our main goal is to AI characters who are knowledgeable about the specific plants and techniques that might be used to grow those plants in space in an educational experience targeted at high school students (see Plants for Space 2024 annual report for more details). The characters will be able to guide a class of students through a discussion, answer questions about any foods that students might come up with and relate off-topic questions back to on-topic learning.

This interactive experience allows the audience (ages 8+) to engage with AI characters who are knowledgeable about the specific plants and techniques that might be used to grow those plants in space.

We aim to showcase how immersive technologies can enhance the learning experience for STEM education and provide pathways for traditional HASS-based game design to produce new pathways for science communication.