Dubai Municipality

An AR and VR platform bringing the wildlife of Dubai's Marmoom Reserve to any screen.

AR / VR & Immersive Digital Experiences AI Solutions Government & Public Sector

Marmoom Desert Conservation Reserve covers 160 square kilometres of protected desert outside Dubai, home to gazelles, migratory birds, and red foxes that the vast majority of the city's residents have never seen. Dubai Municipality commissioned an AR and VR platform not to build new visitor infrastructure, but to collapse the distance between the urban and the wild.

The platform lets users encounter Marmoom's animals at home, in a classroom, or at a museum exhibit: each species rendered in habitat-accurate 3D, with behavioural and conservation detail woven into the interaction rather than appended as a footnote.

Dubai Municipality, featured — Dubai Municipality: AR Animals at Marmoom Reserve

AR / VR & Immersive

The 3D models were built around ethological accuracy: how each animal moves, feeds, and occupies its environment. Educational content was authored to serve adults and children simultaneously: guided discovery sequences rather than static information panels, so the experience shifts from passive to participatory.

Dubai Municipality's own teams manage the platform through a content dashboard built as a first-class deliverable. Species profiles can be updated, conservation data refreshed, and engagement tracked: tools sized to a living reserve, not a one-time installation.

The desert is already there. The brief was to make it visible.

Marmoom Desert Conservation Reserve is one of the largest unfenced natural reserves in the UAE, home to more than 200 species of migratory birds, Arabian gazelles, red foxes, and other wildlife that most Dubai residents have never encountered. Dubai Municipality wanted to change that, not by building new visitor infrastructure, but by using technology to collapse the distance between the city and the desert that surrounds it.

The brief called for an augmented and virtual reality platform that would allow members of the public to encounter Marmoom's animals in immersive, spatially grounded contexts: through a phone held up to a living room wall, through a headset in a school classroom, or through an interactive exhibit at a museum. The challenge was to make the experience genuinely educational without feeling clinical, and genuinely entertaining without trivialising the conservation message.

HoopAI built a platform centered on high-fidelity 3D animal models rendered with habitat-accurate lighting and behaviour patterns. Each species entry in the platform includes ethological detail, how the animal moves, feeds, interacts with its environment, paired with conservation status information and the specific pressures that make Marmoom's protection significant at a regional level. The educational layer was written to serve both adults and children, with interactive scenarios and guided discovery sequences that shift the experience from passive observation to active learning.

The system includes a content management dashboard built for Dubai Municipality's own teams, enabling staff to publish new species profiles, update conservation data, and monitor engagement analytics without external development support. This operational layer was treated as a first-class deliverable: a municipality managing a living natural reserve needs tools that keep pace with the reserve itself, as populations change and new research emerges.

Beyond the consumer-facing experience, the platform was designed for deployment in educational centres, exhibitions, and public spaces, extending Marmoom's reach into contexts where formal nature education rarely arrives. In doing so, it positions Dubai as a government that treats its natural heritage not as a footnote to its urban ambition, but as something worth building technology around.

Client

Dubai Municipality

Industry

Government & Public Sector

Services

AR / VR & Immersive
Digital Experiences
AI Solutions

Office

Dubai

Year

2024

Studio

HoopAI Creative Studio