Resources

Kim Thomas

Augmented reality (AR) is a new and unfamiliar concept to most of us, but one which you can expect to hear a lot more of in coming months. AR enables users to handle, and interact with, virtual 3D objects in real time - not by using a mouse, keyboard or joystick but as if they were holding them in their hand.

All users need is a PC, the AR software and a webcam. The AR software takes a webcam picture and applies a pattern recognition process. This is trained to find a special grid pattern that a user can hold in their hand. The result is that users see themselves on the screen, holding and moving 3D objects.

With the collaboration of an open source community called AR Toolkit, Adrian Woolard and his team at the BBC have been exploring the technology's potential in broadcasting, and are now looking at its possible uses in the classroom. They have recently undertaken two projects with teachers and pupils in schools to find out if their ideas bear fruit in practice.

For the first project, Adrian's team worked with BBC Jam, the new interactive learning service for 5-16 year-olds. BBC Jam's literacy team had come up with a story, written by Rob Lewis, called Looking for the Sun, about some creatures on a beach trying to find the sun after it has disappeared behind a cloud. The team worked with animations and interaction designers to build a proof-of-concept based on the story that could be used in primary schools. The idea was that, with the use of an interactive whiteboard and a webcam, a teacher could guide a group of children interactively through the story. "It works very like a mirror," says Adrian. "You have the webcam placed above the screen. So as you move to the left it moves with you. As you move closer things get bigger, and as you move further away things get smaller."

Having worked previously with technically savvy 9-14 year-olds, Adrian and his colleagues weren't sure how children aged 5 and 6 would respond to the technology. In fact, it didn't faze them at all: "What was really surprising was that they were immediately lost in character and story, and the interface was just another potentially more intuitive mechanism for getting their hands on the characters."

Without prompting, the children engaged very imaginatively with the interface. "Initially the children were just picking up a character and looking at it. But they didn't just pick it up - they'd immediately start applying attributes to it. They'd start saying, 'My ant lives under a big red rock and his best friend is a crab,' taking bits they'd heard through the story, but stimulating their imaginations further."

In educational terms, says Adrian, the beauty of the AR software is the ability it gives children to use their imaginations, as they would in ordinary play: "You're only providing certain things like characters: they embellish it with their own stories, so they describe what the sun might look like, or whether it's a rainy day or a hot day. With other 3D virtual worlds you [the designers] have to fill in everything, but when children play without computers, they embellish their world with their own creativity."

It is also a much more collaborative technology than traditional ICT. When primary school teachers work with children, they usually get them to do a lot of moving around and acting out stories, but when it comes to ICT, children end up sitting at a PC and working alone. AR enables eight or nine children to work together at a whiteboard, says Adrian: "It offers a highly stimulating way of moving beyond the keyboard and a solitary learning place."

The team is now going to carry out a three-month public trial of the AR software. A second story by Rob Lewis, Little Feet and Big Feet, has been written with the technology in mind, and the team is inviting 1,000 users (a mix of teachers and parents) to test the software and to take part in two brief e-mail surveys about it. The teacher or parent can read through the story out loud as the children carry out the interactions.

Adrian explains how it works: "It's a story book, and on one page you get an element of the story, and on the other page as you hold it up to the webcam, a scene is there for you to play out. On the back page of the printout are two paddles, and the two paddles are the two key characters of the story, Big Feet and Little Feet. When you see them on the screen initially they appear as eggs with their feet sticking out, and you have to move the paddles close together and crack the egg. After three cracks they pop out and they're your characters that you take through the story."

A second small technical experiment (as part of BBC Learn Express trials exploring the use of rich media in the classroom), involving KS3 pupils and teachers in 12 secondary schools in Westminster, is being used to teach technology and science. It a collaboration directly with Westminster LEA, Westminster City Learning Centre and Excellence in Cities. It's still in the early stages, but the results have been promising. Teachers are working closely with the development teams to co-design materials that they can try out at very earliest stages of development. Part of the scope of the work is to also encourage pupils to produce their own content (through text, images and even 3D models) to explain scientific concepts.

In one example, to demonstrate the alignment of the sun, Earth and moon, pupils are able to hold the Earth in their hands and examine it from different angles. In another example, says Adrian, that explores how the human body works, pupils can see a skeleton with muscles overlaid across their arm. At a teacher's request, the team is developing an application so that when the pupils 'hold' a heart in their hands, the 3D heart on screen can be made to beat in synch with the pupil's own heart.

Teachers and pupils have responded enthusiastically, and the software has been particularly successful with the more unruly children, says Adrian: "Here was a genuine sense that a lot of the more disaffected learners in the class tend to have a kinaesthetic preference, and they were really engaged at the point when they were using it." Adrian also hopes that the technology will work well with SEN pupils.

Ultimately, Adrian sees AR as one educational tool among many: "Our ambition for it would be that it sits alongside all existing ICT resources, so you can think, 'I've got this particular group coming in. They can use this Flash tool, this website, these physical models, an AR interface, mobile technology - whichever is most appropriate for learner and content."