Augmented Reality - Week 5

Augmented reality - along with virtual reality - is up and rising in recent years with more people buying these technologies for their home. AR is becoming more popular as time goes by and is becoming more prevalent in todays times with our changing and adapting society. Augmented reality is a really good technology to introduce into schools as these are the kinds of technologies that are going to be huge when today’s school kids go into the workforce so all these skills that they will learn in school and adopt in school will be extremely useful and beneficial in their future careers.

‘Both Tim Cook (Apple) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) have said they view augmented and mixed reality as "the next computing platform".’ (EDUC3620 Ilearn site)

Although I was not in class in week 5, when I talked to my peers after class they said they had walked around the classroom and looked at five different technologies and played around with them. After they waked around and looked at the technologies, they went back to their computers and opened up ‘Zapworks’ which is a tool that allows you to design and implement your own AR experience. It is a free AR creation tool, where you are allocated 5 projects free with the free subscription (labelled Hobbyist).

In a non school setting augmented reality experiences can even enable shoppers to determine and choose the best colour as well as fit for the item they are wanting to purchase as it shows them how it may look on a similar body type to theirs. For example, shops and consumers will use AR technology to

try on different pairs of sunnies and normal glasses or different colours of the same clothing item to see which one they like they best or which one suits the best. People can even use AR to see how a certain couch or lounge suit would fit within their home. The Optometrist brand, Specsavers, are utiliing AR as an online resource for their customers to be able to remotely try on different styles of glasses to see which suits them best, without physically coming into the shop.

Augmented reality could be used in a school setting to incite students to be creative and design their own AR scenes and play around with it. It is also good in an education setting as it could be a way to implement an element of play into learning which is exciting for students and will potentially make them grasp the knowledge more and be more inclined to listen and join into the fun and learning in the classroom. This could be done through gamification. Such as making a scavenger hunt in an AR scene to test their knowledge on content or items they have been learning in class.

References:

Akçayır, M., & Akçayır, G. (2017). Advantages and challenges associated with augmented reality for education: A systematic review of the literature. Educational Research Review, 20, 1-11.

Chen, P., Liu, X., Cheng, W., & Huang, R. (2017). A review of using Augmented Reality in Education from 2011 to 2016. Innovations in smart learning, 13-18.

EDUC3620 Ilearn site, Macquarie University.

Elmqaddem, N. (2019). Augmented reality and virtual reality in education. Myth or reality?. International journal of emerging technologies in learning, 14(3).

Prodromou, T. (Ed.). (2020). Augmented reality in educational settings. Brill/Sense.

Jumani, A. K., Siddique, W. A., Laghari, A. A., Abro, A., & Khan, A. A. (2022). Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality for Education. Multimedia Computing Systems and Virtual Reality, 189-210.