Rebecca's Research Blog

Lee Stott, Microsoft @lee_stott

AR is a method of looking at the world through a different lens.

Several current issues: connectivity, need for Internet and app store, device ownership, user interfaces. Either you build new interfaces for every devices, and people keep buying new devices, or you go for the lowest common denominator.

Commercial AR: Kogan AR app allows you to see what a piece of tech such as a television would look like in your room.

Games-based AR: finding objects in your house that increase your points in a game that you are playing.

Sensor-based AR: looks at input from device sensors. Examples include Photosynth and the Live Butterflies viewer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO43NOXgzyE that uses the iPhone gyroscope.  You can download a free toolkit to build these (although I didn’t get a link to that, and I can’t find it)

Geo-AR: takes real-world objects and adds information from the augmented world. It takes into account your location and your direction. Intel have a device that pulls information from your Facebook account and advertises directly to you when you walk into a shop such as Top Shop (again, I can’t track down a link to this, though Intel are obviously doing things with AR http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/11/intels-checklist-of-innovations-coming-the-next-18-months-on-the-pc/ )

Wii as AR – the wii is augmented reality in that you are doing things and the computer knows about it. Microsoft is about to launch Nike Plus Sports, which will allow you to get awards and recognition for games but also to build up stamina and fitness.

Physical-interaction-based AR. Two million sensors embedded in a table, which is thin like an LED screen and which can be mounted at any angle.

Microsoft is working with Guide Dogs for the Blind to transform the ways in which blind people get out and about. Good technology is almost invisible to the user – they view as part of their physicality. The work in this area is not solely for people with a visual impairment, these technologies have the potential to benefit everybody.

Cool video – well worth watching www.guidedogs.org.uk/inspiring-future-technologies

Personal AR – an evolution of personal AI, and of decision engines. Getting an AI agent to do things like make appointments for you and to make predictive suggestions.

AR Browser: Nokia City Lens is built into the Nokia Lumia phone. It knows where you are and can display local information http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMdNtVqYJIw

What lies ahead: more cultural heritage in digital form, AR more accessible to more people, people better equipped with tools to add creatively to the AR resources available, an exponential growth in mass cultural expression, and a cloud culture.

Graphene is making all this possible – it conducts electricity and can be embedded into any material http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

Also important is near field communication (NFC), a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish communication when near each other or touching. This enables, for example, contactless payment.

Matthew Ramirez, University of Manchester

Prezi: http://prezi.com/k4rkzzlqgvkt/augmented-reality-in-education-event-2012/

Blog: http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/

Wiki: scarlet.mimas.ac.uk/mediawiki – this contains lots of useful info and links

Project scarlet uses computer graphics to add a layer of information to the real world. As part of their course, students need to consult books within controlled conditions within library study rooms. In these rooms, objects are isolated from secondary resources and digital resources. AR helps students to look at primary sources surrounded by contextual materials. The experience is led by an academic and built into the aims and objectives of the module. It required a multidisciplinary team, a special collections manager, student voice, academics and developers.

They worked with ten key editions of Dante and with the oldest surviving fragment of the Gospel of St John. Around the fragment, the project provides its original context in the document, a peer-reviewed video, the English translation, and a mobile-optimised page with information links and bibliography. With the Dante you get a commentary by the academic, and can link to a mobile-optimised set of resources. Students were able to book out ipads in order to view the content, and could also view it elsewhere on a standard computer.

They used junaio – glue-based recognition http://www.junaio.com/develop/docs/glue/

A problem for AR is that there are no ratified standards, so there is no code base on which to build AR. The upside of this is that competing companies are driving innovation.

Students liked going to the library, seeing the artefacts and having all the information gathered together. It could be used not only for content delivery but also to get students to develop content themselves. The project was also a way of surfacing library content not only to students but also to academics and the wider public, [providing access to underused resources.

The first year students found it a good way of establishing basic knowledge. It enthused them and encouraged them. Final year students found the basic content less relevant, but liked the video introductions to specific objects, and liked having a central reference point they could use for the initial planning of essays.

It is important that students are immersed in the activities; otherwise they ask why they can’t just view the material in the VLE.

Use of AR needs to be contextual, closely linked to both the objective and to the learning. It shouldn’t be a generic resource. Important not to underestimate the time needed to create it.

For the future, they are looking at the possibilities for medical learning or for hairdresser training. AR works very well in situational learning, where you don’t have access to computers but you do have access to mobile devices. For example, you could link to a video on how to cut a certain style.

They also do a service called Land Map that allows you to access topographical data from across the UK http://www.landmap.ac.uk/index.php/About/ This could be used, for example, to create 3D models showing the type of housing in an area, and these models could then be linked to 3D printers.

The Team Scarlet wiki gives you access to a toolkit that helps you to align augmented reality, technology and pedagogy with specific aims and objectives.

They are currently working with the University of Sussex and the University of the Creative Arts. They have a video of an interview with Lucy Robinson at the University of Sussex who is leading a project on the eighties, and is excited that you can take objects and ephemera and set them in their wider context, the world that they spoke from and that they spoke to.

You can put Google Analytics on to AR resources in order to monitor how many times resources are accessed.

City University, London, 21 0ctober 2012 – #AREE2012

http://blogs.city.ac.uk/care/ar-event/

http://blogs.city.ac.uk/care/2012/11/23/ar-in-education-event/

Videos http://blogs.city.ac.uk/care/?p=238

Augmented reality in education http://blogs.city.ac.uk/care/

cARe, Creating Augmented Reality for Education

Farzana Latif, City University

Video overview of project http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMWdFadqjg0

Describes a public health walk around east London. When students find a marker, they can access resources about the history of the area, and a series of reflective tasks. They are encouraged to use the technology they have with them in order to tweet and take photos. In each area, you get a video with subtitles.

Issues included vandalism (markers were obscured or defaced), not everyone had appropriate devices (the app requires a video camera and a camera), GPS accuracy is not always good, personal safety.

The app is available free from the iTunes store, and requires a built-in camera

Learner analytics use the experiences of a community [network?] of learners to help individual learners in that community to identify more effectively learning content from a potentially overwhelming set of choices.

Analytics and recommendations have generative power. The object recommended many not yet exist – it may be something that the learner must construct or that is constructed from the recommendation.

Analytics can be assessed from numerous perspectives, including: accuracy, adaptivity,  behaviour,  confidence, coverage,  coverage,  diversity,  drop-out rate,  effectiveness of learning,  efficiency of learning,  learner improvement,  novelty,  precision (comparing resources selected by user with those selected by algorithm),  prediction accuracy,  privacy,  reaction of learners,  recall (ratio of relevant results to those presented by algorithm) results,  risk,  robustness,  satisfaction, scalability,  serendipity,  trust, user preference,  utility.

(MUPPLE seminar – Hendrik Drachsler)

Philippe distinguishes between a personal information environment and a personal learning environment. [I know that in this case a personal learning environment isn’t just everything around me when I’m learning, but is a personalised form of a VLE. In that case, what is a personal information environment? Is it all the sources from which I gain information? In which case it seems to me the same as my learning network.]

Personal information environment = learning network?

Twitter supports a read/write loop. It shows us what we have done and what we can do next. The function of a re-tweet is to spread information to another community. When we retweet, are we spreading the information or are we aiming at reducing the information gap in our own community? [I’m not sure what an information gap is. Also, I think this view assumes a particular type of Twitter user, who has selected and weeded both the people they follow and their followers. Other Twitter users have different models – they follow everyone who follows them, or they try to collect as many followers as possible. One function of a retweet is to spread the information, another is to establish yourself as a good source of information, another is to open up the possibility of new ties between your readers and the writer you are retweeting).

(MUPPLE seminar – Philippe Dessus, Grenoble)

The Civil War app changes in real time and plays out over four and a half years, producing a daily casualty count. This has been criticised as being too immersive – uncomfortable for many people.

The Iraq War Memorial app superimposes a war memorial on a real scence

http://gamesalfresco.com/2011/02/21/augmented-reality-u-s-iraq-war-memorial/

The war memorial app, brings a virtual representation into the physical world. Street Museum brings the past of the physical world into the present by syuperimposing pictures of London’s past over London’s present. For example, it shows pictures of London during the Blitz.

Suchtweetsorrow.com presents a modern retelling and reworking of the story of Romeo and Juliet

http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyhayes/5778206030/ looks at the building blocks of experiential media – including the physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual experiential building blocks. The spiritual level involves the experience prompting those involved to change their belief system.

(Notes from Creating Second Lives in Bangor 2011)

Learning occurs in contexts – it also creates contexts.

Context is not fixed – it is an emergent property of interaction.

The challenge is to go beyond modeling human activity in context, in order to augment it.

(Take-away from Liz FitzGerald technology coffee morning, 19 October)

Mobile devices allow us to shift and personalise time. They allow us to visit places before we arrive and to remain in places after we have left. We renegotiate our time on the fly, and schedule soft meetings with flexible boundaries.

They allow us to fill what would previously have been dead time.

We dignify an occasion by switching off our mobile devices to devote our time to the present.

(Take-away from John Traxler seminar on mobile learning, 13 October)

Different partners are likely to be part of different activity systems, with different objectives, different motivations and different tools.

Shared situational objects can be a turning point in negotiations between such partners – reflecting their different perspectives on the same themes. These shared objects sit between the activity systems and offer the potential to bring them together.

Space can act as one of these shared objects, if partners share the same space and have to negotiate its division.

(Notes from the 2011 ReLive conference)

Picking up the theme of gaming, Marian Petre found teenagers using readily available Internet resources to engage in playful navigation and reuse of the information space. Examples:

• Pseudo-Friend – create a person in Facebook and see how many friends they can attract
• Brimstone Rhetoric – justify any position of argument using biblical quotes
• Degrees of Separation – How many links it takes to get from one concept or another
• Way Finding – Navigate to a designated destination using only the most-zoomed view on Google Maps
• Tower of Babel – Use online translators in order to hold conversations in a language you don’t know.

Such games are creative inventive or imaginative. They require, or help develop critical thinking, problem solving or some computational nous. They tend to be mischievous, mildly rebellious or satirical.

Can we bring mischief to the aid of education? Part of intelligent play is that it crossed boundaries and breaks a few rules. Is there a way to bring this into education and still make it compelling?

Petre, M. (2011) Intelligent games. ACM Inroads, (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education), 2 (2).  ISSN 2153-2184.