Augmented Reality in Education

This project examines the use of augmented reality practices as a development tool for educational activities within a museum context.

It relates to an interactive exhibit, that is part of the temporary exhibition “AEGEAN: Creation of an Archipelago” and is especially designed to educate and entertain visitors of all ages and mainly the groups of primary school pupils who shall enjoy an educational tour.

The project focuses on discovery-based learning activities, where visitors are able to interact with the museological content simply by browsing a (printed) book, lying in front of a screen.

We have developed a custom Android application using the Unity authoring tool, the Vuforia SDK (a Unity extension that allows developers to build vision-based augmented reality applications) and the UDOO, (ARM Cortex-A9 Quad core board) as our computing system. For computer vision, we use the Autofocus Camera 5.0 from the UDOO store, with satisfactory results.

The purpose of our project is to investigate whether the familiar method of retrieving information – like leafing through a book – combined with augmented reality practices, can contribute to the development of new teaching methods that can improve the educational process.