Augmented Reality and why educators should care

Today i was able to attend Augmented Reality: is it for real and why should you care?, which was hosted by Sobel Media.

According to the Sobel Media website:

Augmented Reality may be new to your lexicon, but if you watch televised football, it’s already part of your weekend routine: the “1st and 10” line is a leading example of this emerging technology. From Esquire magazine to James Cameron’s blockbuster “Avatar,” technologists are redefining photo realism by integrating graphics from the screen with our real-world environments. Augmented reality blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer-generated to enhance what we see, hear, feel and smell.
At our next event, we’ll explore and predict the business potential for Augmented Reality…from advertising to marketing, to entertainment and education…and beyond.

Augmented Reality is nothing new, however the barrier of implantation are what have kept the technology from flourishing, much like rise and fall of Virtual Reality, which i predict will be making a comeback soon. Through the use of opensource software such as the Flash based implementation of ARToolKit by the name of FLARToolKit, it has enable the experience to be accessible to a mainstream audience. Although marker based augmented reality experiences are just one of many possible implementations, it does open up a third dimensional opportunity, through the use of a any browser that supports Flash, a printed marker, FLARToolKit, and any of the popular 3D flash libraries such as Away3D or Papervision.

Bellow is the Esquire Magazine’s implementation of the user experience:

Another quite creative implementation by http://www.t-post.se, the self proclaimed “world’s first wearable magazine”:

Although these types of execution could be quite powerful for a brand, there is a very thin line between novelty and practicality. Both are by far one of the best implementation, however there are hundreds of “not so great” passive implementations that litter youtube.

Taking a step back from the initial wow factor that this type of experience offers, and analyzing the additional affordances that this type of experience offers the user, we could start to identify some amazing tools that could be leverage in an educational setting.

According to Affordances and Limitations of Immersive Participatory Augmented Reality Simulations for Teaching and Learning :

Research on how people learn suggests that learning and cognition are complex social phenomena distributed across mind, activity, space, and time (Chaiklin and Lave 1993; Hutchins 1995; Wenger 1998). A student’s engagement and identity as a learner is shaped by his or her collaborative participation in communities and groups, as well as the practices and beliefs of these communities. Yet creating classroom activities that allow students to engage in authentic practices that involve communities of learning is challenging, especially when it comes to authentic prac- tices of science (Chinn and Malhotra 2002).

Here are a few that i have, but feel free to add any others in the comments:

• Situating activity: By creating a partially immersive environment the student is able to engage in meaningful activities.
• Multiple fields of viewing: The student has the ability to control their perspective by adjusting the marker in 3D space. This is leaps beyond the 2D experience that books, televisions, and most computer environments offer.
• Testing Hypothesis: Since the models are virtual, student could safely test hypothesis, by adjusting variable attributes that directly effect the virtual model. This by far is one the most important affordances that gets under utilized, with the most educational impact. By allowing students to safely test hypothesis in a real-time immersive environment, there would be less of cognitive strain which creating accurate mental models of events posses with text and static photos. This also give the learner control of their experience, which help them in constructing their own knowledge.
• Cost: As web cameras are increasingly becoming a norm and integrated directly into computers, theoretically the only additional cost to a classroom is the price of one sheet of paper that you print out a marker on.

The MIT Teacher Education Program, in conjunction with The Education Arcade, has been working on creating “Augmented Reality” simulations to engage people in simulation games that combine real world experiences with additional information supplied to them by handheld computers.

HARP, another example which was developed with funding from a U.S. Department of Education Star Schools Program grant, allowed researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Teacher Education Program at MIT have developed an “augmented reality” game designed to teach math and science literacy skills to middle school students.

The game is played on a Dell Axim handheld computer and uses Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to correlate the students’ real world location to their virtual location in the game’s digital world. As the students move around a physical location, such as their school playground or sports fields, a map on their handheld displays digital objects and virtual people who exist in an augmented reality world superimposed on real space. This capability parallels the new means of information gathering, communication, and expression made possible by emerging interactive media (such as Web-enabled, GPS equipped cell phones with text messaging, video, and camera features).

Here is another interesting implementation of AR for an educational setting:

Here is a “dramatization” of some of the possibilities in education, which include enhancing the modalities that books could supply. Although a dramatization, asides from the eyeglasses, which are not available as of today, most if not all the scenarios are possible with today’s technology:

Augmented Reality – VFX Breakdown from soryn on Vimeo.

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