GenMars: Making Tomorrow's Farm Jobs Feel Like Today's Adventure

The Brief

Bahagian Pembangunan Kapasiti dan Latihan Pertanian (BPKLP), the agricultural capacity building and training division of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (KPKM), runs the training pathways that bring new people into Malaysian agriculture through TVET Pertanian.

Their challenge is one the whole sector shares: youth interest in farming is low. To many young people it still means hard labour and low pay, not drones, sensors and automation. For their space in the KPKM pavilion at MAHA 2026, BPKLP wanted young visitors to see agriculture as a career worth choosing.

A Colony That Needs a New Generation

Telling teenagers that farming is high-tech rarely works. Letting them do the job, in a world they already find exciting, does. So instead of a one-off booth game, we built GenMars (Generasi Marikh): a playable future-careers universe.

The story is simple. A colony on Mars needs a new generation to build it, and every industry is a job the colony needs done. Players enrol in one academy, meet one cast of characters, and take on missions that mirror the real work Malaysia needs young people for. We call it XR career edutainment: careers you can play, take home and share.

Feeding the colony comes first, so agriculture is the first mission.

Mission One: Agriculture

There was nothing to download. Visitors scanned a QR code at the booth, entered a nickname, and picked their first task on their own phone. Three tasks, each built around a technology that is already changing farms in Malaysia, with a locked reward waiting at the end.

Three Tasks, Three Technologies

• Drone Patrol: fly a farm drone over a Mars crop field to watch over and look after the plants.
• Bio Dome Harvest: steer an automated harvester down the crop rows, collecting ripe produce and dodging rocks against the clock.
• Smart Greenhouse: keep a vertical greenhouse alive by reading each plant's needs and responding with shield, oxygen, heater and water controls.

Each one is short, scored and timed, so it can be finished while walking the pavilion. Mars makes the point without a lecture: the tools that would feed a colony on another planet are the same ones changing farming here at home. And because everything runs on visitors' own phones, any number of people could play at once.

Graduating as a Future Farmer

Clearing all three tasks unlocked the Field Reward: a claim code on the visitor's phone. They brought it to the GenMars kiosk, built on our PicXR platform, scanned in, and had their photo taken. AI placed them in the colony as their own GenMars character, printed on the spot as a Generasi Marikh Academy Future Farmer postcard, with a digital copy to download.

A Postcard That Keeps the Story Going

The postcard carries two QR codes. One opens an AR scene: point a phone at the card and the colony comes to life, with drones and the GenMars mascot flying out of it, ready to save as a photo or video. The other links to TVET Pertanian, the real-world pathway into the job they just played.

That is the loop GenMars is built for: play the career, take it home, share it, and know where to go next.

One World, Many Missions

The kiosk at MAHA was the first format. The real asset is the world behind it: one academy, one mascot, one colony, and a platform that the next mission plugs straight into. Space, energy and other sectors follow on the same characters, platform and kiosk, each with its own look, its own tasks and its own industry partner.

For a ministry, agency or employer, that means a youth career campaign that doesn't start from zero, and a world that young people already know when the next mission arrives.