Augmented Reality in Remote Classrooms
A team led by Purdue University has built an app platform called MetaAR, enabling students and teachers to easily collaborate using augmented reality.
The cost and difficulty make it impossible for most educators to teach in AR. That’s why Ramani and his team have created MetaAR, an authoring platform that allows educators to create their own AR apps. It also allows students and teachers to collaborate remotely in AR.
“We want to make the creation of AR content as simple as creating a PowerPoint file and presenting it yourself,” Ramani said. “Using our technology platform, any instructor can easily train on MetaAR to create their own kits and lesson plans and start collaborating in a virtual classroom.”
For its test case, Ramani’s team built a simple STEM education kit: a small model of a city designed to teach the basics of circuit boards. Wooden pieces, like streets and buildings, had conductive material, which lit up streetlights if students assembled the “circuit” correctly. Using their MetaAR software, the researchers duplicated the pieces in 3D and formulated a simple lesson to teach students how to build the city. In the classroom, students looked at their desks through tablets, which showed them how to orient the physical pieces. It also alerted the students when they placed the physical pieces incorrectly.
MetaAR’s real magic, however, is its collaborative platform. If students had a question, they used video and images of their work to ask for help.
MetaAR will be presented virtually on Tuesday (April 28) at the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, one of the leading conferences on human-computer interaction. Several other members of Ramani’s lab also will present advances in augmented reality, including StoryMakAR, which uses AR to help children create storytelling experiences. Other presentations are a study using AR “ghosts” to teach factory workers to perform machine tasks, and Vipo, a spatial-visual platform to program the interactions of mobile robots.
See the full story here: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2020/Q2/hands-on-with-augmented-reality-in-remote-classrooms.html