Soon, your 6-year old child may well be holding your smartphone or tablet over a Robin Hood book to experience in vivid details, how the savior fights against offenders in the Darbha valley area of Chhattisgarh to save innocent men and women. Yes.. It is the pet project on The Extended Book and Robin Hood by Dr. Dave Miller, UNESCO Chair in New Media Forms of the Book, University of Bedfordshire that will be Augmented Reality (AR) based and will be collaboratively written by authors around the world to bring out an Indianized version of Robin Hood.

With the developments of Google Glass and other related products, decade old Augmented Reality (AR) technology is moving from labs to mainstream adoption.

AR enables superimposition of digital content on real environment thus providing contextualized information to users. In simple words, AR merges the physical and digital worlds in order to make the real world more interactive to the user.

While Virtual Reality is a complete digital representation of the real world, AR is an add-on to the real world. This remarkably enhances the human-information interface and allows very interesting applications to be developed.

When deployed in outdoor environment, virtual information overlays enable a wide range of applications ranging from tourist guides and pedestrian navigation to urban gaming.

It is estimated that developer investment in AR applications will be about US$670 million this year, and is expected to exceed US$2.5 billion in 2018, as AR becomes an everyday part of mobile experience.

Mobile continues to be the preferred device for AR application and is expected that more than 2.5 billion mobile AR applications will get installed by 2017.

In this article, we explore how AR can be used to enhance learning and education.

Applied in Education According to Professor Xiangyu Wang, an internationally recognized expert in AR who is with the faculty of Curtin University, Australia, AR offers an innovative learning experience by merging digital learning material over the physical space, thus providing “situated learning”.

AR broadens the scope of physical learning environment to “outside the classroom” and enables “individualised” learning. Each learner can control her own learning, manipulating digital information and objects as per the need to enhance understanding. AR can also interleave theoretical and practical learning. For example, when you and your son are in the park, your son can point the AR browser in your Smartphone to a seasaw in a park to learn concepts such cantilever, and centre of balance in a natural setting!

In subjects such as biology, chemistry and even physics where it is difficult for learners to imagine complex models and experiments, AR can enhance learning in a real environment. Though AR based learning is being explored more in mathematics and sciences, AR Gaming applications can be used to teach complex business and economics concepts such as Game Theory, negotiations and strategy.

For example, a learner can be trained on complex tasks such as laparoscopic surgery, heavy equipment operation and risky tasks such as firefighting with augmented objects and content.

Risks of failure in AR is minimal as compared to practical real object based training – that is, a heavy fall while demonstrating firefighting as happened in some cases in India, can be avoided using AR based training programs. Researchers have found that the learning curve is steep with AR based training (i.e. shorter time to understand) and that performance post training is also higher, compared to conventional training. Researchers have found that books and tool kits such as AR-Dehaes that contains hundreds of 3D models allows learner to visualize and perform spatial engineering tasks with industrial elements with ease.

AR Books Though most of the text book publishers bundle relevant CDs, content in them are rarely accessed due to complexities such as finding a computer to load and search through the content for relevant information. AR can enable the dreary books to become “live”. By pointing the AR browser (in Tablets or mobiles) to an AR enhanced chapter, students can access all relevant information in various formats (i.e. video and images, articles, talks) pertaining to that chapter in real-time and on the go.

For example, a student who is trying hard to make out the textual description of wind currents and their effect on climatic conditions will be able to point the smartphone to the AR enabled chapter in his text book to access a video that shows the storm system in vivid detail, thus enabling her to better understand the concepts.

Publishers such as Harper Collins have started releasing AR enhanced books. Niche publishers such as BooksAlive.com have started publishing AR enhanced children books.

Relevance for India Though the impact of Right to Education on school education system in India improved Pupil-Teacher Ratio from 42:1 to 32:1, it still thrice that in developed countries. With the RTE mandate, children from lower income groups do have a chance to mingle with children of high income groups in the same school and have access to the same educational material. These less privileged children however may not have access to computer and digital resources at home. However most of such families today own mobiles, thanks to domestic manufacturing, stiff competition and related lower prices. Mobile AR provides students access to key digital information right from their homes without the need for any other device to supplement their text books.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt in the recently released edited book by McKinsey & Co on ‘Reimagining India’ remarked, “Parents who believe their children are not getting proper instruction in local schools will be able to use mobile phones or tablets to help fulfil their kid’s educational needs”. The possibilities with mobile AR are only limited by imagination.

The only caveat is without good broadband connectivity for downloading content, that is conspicuously absent in India, mobile AR can be a frustrating experience. Hope that with more spectrum to be auctioned soon and spectrum trading being allowed, the mobile operators in the country will wake up and enable the huge possibilities of AR to be realised.

(The authors work at at Sasken Communication Technologies. Views are personal.)

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