ARientation at SXSWedu
A new version of ARientation was announced at demoed at SXSWedu in Austin, Texas in early March, 2019.
ARientation is an augmented reality platform geared towards learning and engagement. The purpose is to allow less technically inclined students and teachers to create and share AR enhanced content and environments. It is the brainchild of Eric Hawkinson, a learning futurist working on making emerging technology more accessible to the masses for teaching and learning. This project started as a research project exploring case uses in augmented and mixed realities for educational purposes, the project has already spawned several case studies and research papers, most of which are freely available.
The booth was sponsored by SXSWedu’s playground program, where new educational technologies are invited to have a space in the exhibition to show of their creations and research. The interactive space showcases new strategies to activate students’ learning and features a collaborative stage with Hands On and Talk programming.
The reason this project exists is because members of my immersive research group and myself were becoming increasingly frustrated with the business models, lack of data protection, and non-learning focused commercial choices to use for designing and implemented immersive learning environments, especially for research purposes.
The ARientation project is completely free, built with privacy-by-design, and all triggers are creative commons licenced so you can simply download and print what you need to start using it for free.
The new version of the smartphone application was released just prior to the event. This version is a major upgrade on the previous version but still remains in open beta. To demo some of the contents of the new version of the application, a ‘project wall’ was created that holds all of the images used as triggers for the application as well as some QR codes for loading projects within the app.
The new version of the app sees many new features as well as upgraded image tracking and loading speeds. Some of the new features are
- New Project Creation System
- 3 different project types (Basic, Advanced, and Team)
- Load projects via QR Code
- A host of user options like green screening and overlay orientation
The booth was a hit at the SXSWedu playground and the app now has a host of new beta testers now working with the application thanks to this exposure.
There are already some pretty amazing projects using ARientation. Students and teachers are always finding new and creative uses for this technology. Here are some examples of what has been created so far.
Before I Graduate Community Art Project
Augmented Reality Community Art Space is remade into a book. The contents of this book contain the hopes, wishes, goals, and dreams of students to strive for during college life. It of course contains words and musings of students in the form of written words. The describe career aspirations, social hopes, and life long dreams. But with the help of augmented reality, this book also contains these ideas in video and spoken word. Using a smartphone application called ARientation, those videos and other digital media has been connected to the images of playing cards printed in this book.
Library Scavenger Hunt
Students create a gamified narrative to orientate users to a university media center. The ARientation application and game cards were placed and sometimes hidden throughout the building. You were asked to join an investigation leading into some stolen information, getting hints and tackling challenges along the way. By the time you finished, you knew about the facilities in the media center, how to find periodicals, and how to check out media.
Community AR Rally
In 2016 and 2017, 200+ participants joined our augmented community rally. Teams explored the city and completed challenges using the ARientation application.
TEDxKyoto (Event Promotion Use)
TEDxKyoto used ARientation to help promote the event by capturing augmented photos and live-tweeting them.
Future 20 Presentation
Eric Hawkinson was also invited to give a ‘Future 20’ talk on augmented learning at the event. The short talk was a look into education when the preferred medium of communication in augmented reality.
The talk was recorded by SXSWedu for their podcast and can be found online.
Find more about the project at
Find more about Eric his website (VR optimized)
