Virtual energy fostering real forests

Added to the Museum of Data by Yiqi Zhang on Sunday, October 18, 2020. Museum of Data Collection ID: 475.

Public description: Ant Forest is a project carried on Alipay App, a predominant online payment platform. Users can collect "green energy" by taking green, environmentally-friendly steps, such as walking or riding bikes, taking public transports, going paperless,recycling...basically in broad aspects of daily life. The energy points collected will grow into a virtual tree, and Alipay will plant a real tree in drought reservation areas in China, with over 500 million users joining the project and over 100 million trees planted. Energy points record people's green behavior, carbon footprints into user database through digital technology, whereas these virtual trees can find their corresponding material existence. This ecosystem is consisted of human behavior, algorithm and physical existence. Users perceive the connections with real forests when photos are presented, and they feel like adopting trees and collect fertilizers to grow trees.

Materials used: algorithm, human labor, trees of different types

Credit: Alipay Financial

Size: Virtual tree: Alipay as platform of 225.7MB storage Real trees: covering a total area of 112,000 hectares

Creation date: 2016/08/27 00:00:00

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