Sky Lantern is one of the famous traditional activities in Taiwan. However, this is not good for the environment. To carry on this traditional activity in a sustainable way, you can release your digital sky lantern.
This project is to create a digital sky lantern. It is a hot air balloon with a small fire at the bottom which is made of paper. This is one of the famous traditional activities in Taiwan.
In Taiwan tradition, sky lanterns would be released into the night sky with the wishes. This represents sending wishes and messages to God. Every year, Pingxi District in Taiwan holds an annual Lantern Festival. In this installation, you can release your digital sky lantern through the camera.
According to the report of the Department of Environmental Protection, they recycled more than 290,000 sky lanterns. After the annual Lantern Festival, the amount of trash is more than 17 tonnes. The falling sky lantern not only would cost a huge amount of trash but also would cost water pollution, and affect the animals in the forest. Apart from the waste and pollution problems, there are easy to cause a fire alarm. After releasing the sky lantern, the falling sky lantern may still be on fire which causes a fire alarm affecting the residents nearby or forest.
Hence, this project is creating a digital sky lantern. When people get a physical lantern in front of the camera, the digital one would be released into the sky.
In 2016, google Taiwan create a digital sky lantern platform for lantern festivals that could let foreigners experience this culture. In this campaign, there are more than 2,000,000 visits and over 30,000 digital lanterns were released. Besides, it also has a VR technology that can let users wear google cardboard. In this campaign, they created a website for user to write down their wishes on the lantern. After that, they can release their lanterns into the sky and experience the sky full of sky lanterns with VR technology.
This project would be presented in an interactive way. Visitors can take a small sky lantern. When they turn on the light and put it in front of the camera. A digital one will release into the sky.
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