Augmented reality already impacts almost every industry, and AR human-computer interaction is becoming more mainstream. When you think about an everyday application of augmented reality, what comes to mind? Probably Pokemon Go. In fact, AR comes in many shapes and forms, it can offer the potential to do things that are not possible in a normal interaction in the real world. It offers a potential to reimagine the world in the real time – perhaps change the colour of surrounding items or build 3D objects in real time.
The speed of technological change today is faster than ever, this as well applies to the domain of education – we went through remote tutoring to smart maintenance procedures, and now focused on the next level of tasks. You might think it could turn out that people will become less critically thinking and behave like robots? But let’s have a look at the history.
Van Gogh’s painting “Weaver at the loom”, 1884
Since the beginning of human era people have aimed to improve their environment. Centuries ago technology was the greatest aspect of the industrial revolution. The loom invention was a significant step forward for the factory workers, who freed mental capacity for focusing on other tasks. This invention is one in a row of great technological modifications, which reveal opportunity to centre in on creative problem solving rather than manual labour. As the loom analogy shows, technology can certainly give us as a chance to enhance everyday work and dedicate more time to on-site enquiry. Along with an increased capacity to multitask and learn things more quickly, we have gained an evolutionary benefit in adapting to surrounding conditions.
There is a possibility that in the nearest future, AR devices like Google Glass or Microsoft HoloLens push into our everyday life. We won’t definitely spend all day working or learning with AR glasses on, because ergonomically and technologically there is still a bit of way to covered for full working day use, but at least upgrading our learning paths seems like a good starting point for their subtle integration.
In September 2016, Lyon was meeting place for a collaborative conference, EC-TEL, bringing together experts and pioneers from education, technology, engineering, and entrepreneurship to think about a future vision for education and training. Many people are now guests of AR and other technological experiences, but not daily users. Memorability and experience are connected, and this how we can make learning more enduring. ECTEL covered a lot of innovation. For instance, team members of the WEKIT community hosted a session on new affordances for workplace training for aircraft maintenance, astronaut training, and an ecosystem for smart medical guidance utilising AR. On a series of workshops, other participants shared their ideas about software and hardware engineering, new methods in education for higher institutions as well as primary schools. Such applications like plant recognition, a presentation trainer software providing feedback on posture, speech, and gesture recognition, a guide for mindfulness meditation which measures alpha, beta, and gamma waves in your brain were presented over the various tracks of the conference.
Some of the key steps after this conference our lab in currently focusing on is how to implement a recorder solution to capture experts’ experience and how to, subsequently, make this available to trainees using the same wearable solution. We are currently looking at different aspects for such novel training experience, starting from wearable technology for doctor, engineer, and astronaut training, and finishing with designing and developing the next generation of user interaction paradigms in these platforms.