Technology
Scientists’ Discovery Room Lab - Research group based at Harvard, looking at the use of multi-touch tabletop and wall displays for scientific inquiry and learning.
Virtual Vouchers – Prototyping a mobile augmented reality user interface for botanical species identification. Work by Columbia University, Department of Computer Science.
NiCE Discussion Room - Work at the Austrian Media Interaction Lab to develop a technologically-enhanced discussion room, making use of Anoto digital pens and projected wall displays.
MetaDesk / Tangible Geospace – Visionary work at MIT looking at the use of tangible phicons, tablets and large table top displays for the purposes of exploring a map in 2 and 3 dimensions.
ButterflyNet - Mobile data capture and access system for field scientists, related to the commonly used field notebook. Again based on digital pen capture, but relating this to photographs and location data. Work done at Stanford University.
Bridging the Rural Divide – A project based at Nottingham that explored geo-visualisation of sensor data captured using mobile devices.
ARToolKit – It looks like some of our future ideas for interfaces ‘Out There’ will use Augmented Reality approaches. This is a commonly used toolkit for developing AR apps, maintained by the University of Washington and HIT lab New Zealand.
Wikitude – Another AR platform that could well become useful to us, this one based more around displaying location-based data. Layar is of course another platform focusing on a similar area.
Pinch-the-Sky Dome – A Microsoft Research project that could have real potential for immersing people in 3D location-based data from a distance.
E-Learning
Explore! - A project developing and analysing the use of mobile learning technologies in archaeological sites, conducted by researchers at the IVU lab at the Universita di Bari in Italy.
AMULETS – A project at Linnaeus University, Sweden, exploring the possibilities for connecting indoor and outdoor learning activities. In more recent trials they have used a similar approach to us in having students collaborating synchronously across indoor and outdoor locations.
Savannah – Collaboration between the Universities of Bath, Nottingham and Bristol, Futurelab and HP. Explored the potential for mobile games in learning, utilising location-sensing to immerse children in a simulation of an African savannah, whilst actually in a playing field.
Cohere – An argumentation support tool developed at the Open University. This shows the potential for systems to represent ideas, information and the connections between them. In the OTIH project, this kind of work is inspirational to the development of shared representations between the teams, supporting more effective dialogue.
Geoscience Education
An Empirical Methodology for Investigating Geocognition in the Field - Useful paper by Petcovic, Libarkin and Baker discussing the essential cognitive and behavioural processes involved in geoscience disciplines, and differences between novices and experts in field mapping activities.
Geoscience Concept Inventory - A set of questions that provide a standardised tool for testing conceptual understanding of geology.