Fundamental Friday : AR in Education

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality has some pretty interesting capabilities in the educational field. From heads up display tutorials with hands on delivery, to museum-esc’ educational tours of national parks and landmarks. AR even boasts personal tutor type experiences for Grammar, Math, Health, Science, History, and more!

What are the fundamentals of Augmented Reality? 
Essentially an AR headset is composed of a digital screen with transparent ocular capabilities for visually referencing your actual surroundings. The digital components of the screen allow for superimposed graphics to be displayed in real time over your immediate surrounding. What this does is create a holographic effect for the user, that augments reality with virtual reality.

While headsets may vary in capabilities at the moment from VR to AR, some with both, it’s clear to see the potential for educational immersion is apparent.

Augmented Reality Education

Imagine a teacher conducting a lecture on Dinosaurs, I’m picking this topic because I’m in an a jurassic park type of mood right now, the students with AR headsets on, would be able to follow along while receiving digital references to the teachers curriculum on their device. The teacher would than be able to reference an old text book, you know the ones all the students hate and manage to draw little doodles in, and extend the education of that textbook with Augmented Reality, and in a way… bring the doodles to life… because let’s face it, everything’s better with doodles.

Users like to Doodle

A very popular social networking app has managed to prove that time and time again, yes, I’m talking about Snapchat, the happy little ghost, and by far the best adaptation of augmented reality that has been widely adopted. Just proof that we are moving towards a more immersive content age, and education will be too.

Written by Jules Mrsic, UX @eyeqvr