Bring the learning experience to life!

Are any of you Harry Potter fans? "Picture yourself walking through the halls of Hogwarts. The pictures hanging on the walls of Hogwarts are not your normal, static pictures but are alive and interactive with the students". That's one good analogy to describe the magical experience of Augmented Reality. Augmented reality has created a fun and technologically advanced way of teaching and brings life to the learning experience! This new innovative tool allows us to interact with the 3D world that appears right in front of you.

Just last week Professor Calderwood brought a giraffe to class using Zookazam, a fun augmented reality app for IOS. By viewing the printed targets through this app you can see animals appear right on the desk in front of you or in the palm of your hands. We were able to watch an image actually come to life and our reaction was almost as if were back in elementary school.

But augmented reality can even be utilized outside of the classroom. How VR and AR will be training tomorrow’s workforce explains how augmented reality and virtual reality add labels, captions, and other helpful overlays to a user’s view of his environment in the workforce.  With users able to rewind training and progress at their own pace, VR and AR systems can also help combat our shrinking attention spans. Resource extraction and healthcare both have embraced this technology. Other industries are now following suit. With such a broad range of employee-training applications, it’s clear that both VR and AR technology will be important to the corporate enterprise of the future.

In class we took a look at some other cool AR apps, aside from zookazam, that are described in Four Cool Augmented Reality Science Apps.  These include Elements 4D, which is an AR chemistry app for iOS and Android devices that provides a fun way to look at various different chemical reactions. Also Anatomy 4D, which allows you to explore an augmented reality 3D body and provides models of the human body as well as an interactive heart. And finally, NASA’s Spacecraft 3D, which lets you learn about and interact with a variety of spacecraft that are used by NASA to explore our solar system, study Earth, and observe the universe.