The Future of Art Education is Bright with AR
How AR Education will change the way students view art
My art education was bad. I know that the volunteers were doing their best in the bi-monthly art education seminar at my elementary school. It’s great that the school cared enough about art to wrangle a parent into teaching a bunch of unappreciative 4th grade rascals but… it was bad.
The problem wasn’t the information, there was plenty of that. It was a bad art class because it didn’t get anyone excited about art or the pursuit of art. It doesn’t have to be that way and I think Augmented Reality will change that by transforming the way students learn about and view art.
For example, instead of looking at Michelangelo’s works on a PowerPoint presentation, the statue of David could be erected right in the middle of the room, available for close examination and critique by every nine year old in the room.
In a picture you get what you get, a picture on the screen taken from the perspective of the photographer. In AR you get a 3D model wherever you want it, that is completely under your control. Manipulating and moving around a work of art is a more captivating experience than just looking at a picture of it. The nature of AR is the best way harness the fact that interactivity has been shown to improve students ability to learn and retain (Beauchamp, 2010).
I see this form of teaching becoming the norm in the not-so-distant future, and I see art being a particularly big benefactor of the future of AR Education.
Where are we now and the future
I was inspired after reading a paper by the Polytechnic University of Milan (Barsanti, 2015) on 3D visualization of cultural heritage artifacts. Projects like these could lead the way to a revolution where you don’t just learn about the greatest works in the Louve, you can have them in your classroom and examine them up close and personal. Furthermore, if there is a tool available to view artifacts, museums will have incentive to create a digitized library of their collection.
I have already seen a cool example of using ARkit to place art on walls by LaanLabs. This app allows the user to place pictures or art on the walls of their house, then change the style using deep learning. With the recent update for Vertical Plane Detection I can only imagine how far this tech will go.
My hope is that this technology will truly inspire students early on in their education and create the next generation of artists.
If you want to talk more about AR in Education and what my company Artemis Education is doing with it feel free to message me on LinkedIn.
Works Cited
Barsanti, S. Gonizzi, et al. “3D visualization of cultural heritage artefacts with virtual reality devices.” The International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences 40.5 (2015): 165.
Beauchamp, Gary, and Steve Kennewell. “Interactivity in the classroom and its impact on learning.” Computers & Education 54.3 (2010): 759–766.
