Learning Augmented Reality

What I have learnt

I was thinking on methods to make my lessons to engage my learners, thus I look around for a few ideas. One of the ideas was to use Augmented Reality or AR to break the monotony to just worksheets. There are many approach in AR, one of them is to build it from scratch, even with my experiences as a programmer, I find it rather silly to reinvent the wheel, especially at this era. So I begin to search for an AR platform.

Learning and Exploring New Tools

Out of the many AR platforms that I explored, Aurasma seems to stand out more. After reading articles on regard to it and the reviews written by organizations using it, I decided to give it a try. From there, I began to read the documentation of the platform. During the few months while I was trying it out, the platform was renamed to HP Reveal. However, everything seems to be the same, even the videos from the official channel explaining the AR platform still show the old Aurasma. The truth is that everything is the same except the name was changed. So even though I was shocked with the name change, but whatever I have built remain intact, so its okay.

I have played with games in AR before, I roughly know how it works. The concept of AR is to have a physical objects or marker to overlay the AR objects onto it. But it was a little different before, previously they have very clear markers with simple black and white icons for mapping. This time round the marker can be as sophisticated as a photo, but the photo must have clear features for detection even when printed in black and white.

To do that I will need printed documents, so I began to look for a tool. Since I am not working on commercial products, it just doesn't make sense in investing on a premium tool like Photoshop or Illustrator. Thus, the tool I chose to explore is a free tool Draw.IO, which can be used in Google Drive. Since I have some experience in Photoshop and Illustrator, using this tool wasn't too difficult. I began using it by drawing diagrams and flowcharts for my learners.

Below are links of documentation and information about the tools I have chosen to learn.

Aurasma Overview (Now known as HP Reveal)Source: Youtube Channel - HP Reveal

draw.io - Diagrams For Everyone, EverywhereDiagrams for everyone, everywhere draw.io is an open platform to create and share diagrams Try draw.io for free For making flowcharts, process diagrams, org charts, UML, ER diagrams, network diagrams and much more.

Link Draw.IO Diagram Documentation

Usage of Learning Experiences

From the things Iearnt, I manage to create some printed worksheet with work with the AR content. And using the HP Reveal as the platform to display the content in Augmented Reality. Below is how the worksheet look like when created in the Draw.IO tool. To see how the AR project turn out and look like, you can view the video below.

Screenshot of how the AR worksheet is created with Draw.IO

Video recording of the deployed AR worksheets and contents.

Analyze & Evaluate the Experiences

After implementing it, I did many tests to make sure it can run well, include getting my colleagues to try it out. The learning curve wasn't as high as programming it myself but it does take some trial and error. And to make it work as a free user, the device or user accessing the AR content must subscribe to the channel. This actually took quite some time to test out myself. Especially during one of the session, when I was teaching my colleagues to use the tool, the some of AR contents wasn't able to display on their devices, after debugging it myself I noticed that those content was set to private, which my device or user can access. This is a good experience as I was able to fully tested it before I deploy it for real with my learners.

While I was going through some lessons before deploying this, I realize that if I were to just use the AR, its can be a fun activity but the retention of the learning might not be strong. Therefore, I made another worksheet that require the learner to write down their AR lesson findings. After all the updates and fine tuning, it was ready for the actual lesson run.

After accessing those content, my learners show enjoyment, and they are more enthusiastic to complete the worksheets, however I do noticed the planning and efforts required is quite high for such a short session. I must agree that maybe doing it the first time will definitely take longer, but to infuse lesson content with such deployment take a lot of time and planning. Overall, the result seems good, so if I were to do it for another lesson, I must plan really early to analyze more lesson contents to find suitable one.

The AR platform itself can be of use not just for deploying lessons, especially when now mobile devices is widely used, it can be use for many commercial and non-commercial scenarios. For example, in commercial, it can use to put on restaurant menu to entertain the customers or give more information about their dishes. And in non-commercial use, beside educational usage, one of the ideas, is that it can also be use for any organizations to update notice boards with AR, that would save a lot of papers.

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