I hope we don’t have to wait for version 4.0 before the iPad comes equipped with a camera. I’m ready now! Gary Hayes sent me the link to his video on YouTube illustrating the augmented reality (AR) experience on an iPad-sized screen. It is a great video; it really captures a sense of the potential of AR across a gamut of applications. With touch screen capabilities, you could also draw over your environment. It will create a whole new way to have immersive learning environments by allowing immersive problem-solving.
Who Wants More Reality?
August 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Kids with augmented reality planets
Previously published on Psychology Today.com “Positively Media”
———-
Sometimes when new technology is introduced, you get a glimpse of the future. The iPad was like that for me. Now Samsung is introducing the Galaxy Tab (tablet) on September 2. This time, the glimpse of the future comes from their marketing pitch not their product. The top item the Galaxy Tab offers those who want “more”? Augmented reality.
Samsung’s Galaxy is an interesting and slick entrant in the tablet field. Size-wise, it’s halfway between the size of a cell phone and an iPad with a screen big enough to see things without squinting. (I’ve heard the iPad called an iPhone for old people.) Personally, I really didn’t expect to like the iPad as much as I do, but I carry it everywhere. It’s pretty hard to be an Apple-killer these days, but Samsung got a couple of things right that Apple missed in the first generation: the camera/video function.
It is those added features that drive the sales pitch of the Galaxy Tab teaser promo video. However, the promo is more revealing about the changing media technology landscape than the attributes of the tablet. When the video asks the consumer “Need More?” It offers up augmented reality ahead of video calls and full web browsing.
Augmented reality bridges the Internet with the real world as a functional reality. It takes the information you can find on the Internet—from directions and prices to history—and superimposes it onto reality.
NFL uses augmented reality to mark the down lines
Terminator vision is augmented reality
If you’ve seen the digital down lines on a football field, or Terminator vision, then you’ve seen applications of augmented reality. Augmented reality not only merges the information from the Internet with the real world, but it allows you to access information when and where you need it. And it does this for you while you are out in the real world. All this magic comes from easy to use, free software and a camera-equipped mobile phone with Internet access. Get restaurant reviews or comparison shop just by pointing your phone. Identify a plant, see what a London street corner looked like in 1890, find out when a building was built of if there is an office for rent. This is a tiny tip of the iceberg of how we will be able to think about communications in the not-so-distant future.
Augmented reality is better than a local director service
Augmented reality will be as disruptive a technology as Web 2.0 because it takes user-control of information and personal experience with technology to a whole new level. It makes information geographically and time relevant while access is totally geographically and time irrelevant.
By layering text, audio, video and images over reality, augmented reality enhances our understanding of how things work. It’s like getting to be a perpetual 2 year old, asking ‘what’s that?’ For some cool examples of using augmented reality like a time machine: see London’s Street Museum and History Pin.
Unlike other types of technology, augmented reality transforms the environment into an immersive learning ecology (even if you aren’t trying to learn something.) Creating an immersive environment has many advantages. In embodied cognition terms, we have many ways of manipulating the environment to help us think. Augmented reality allows us to off-load cognitive work onto the environment in all new ways. That leaves all kinds of brain ergs available for something more useful: synthesizing information, problem solving, reasoning, and planning. At a time when people are worrying about information overload, augmented reality is the ultimate filter. It will not show you the price of a latte in Tallahassee if you are in NYC. You are in charge. Your information is targeted, self-selected and self-relevant. Augmented reality is working through what I think of as the “shiny penny” stage, full of exciting new-kid-on-the-block bells and whistles. Unless finding the closest Starbucks is a critical issue for you, it hasn’t been used much in prosocial or substantive ways, but that will come soon. (See, for example, Imagined Communities. ) The potential for environmental exploration and learning is extraordinary. Physical objects are often used in education: they convey meaning, relationships, provide opportunities for collaboration, and focus attention.
Vito Technology’s Star Walk
Augmented reality is powerful because it extends our ability to use the power of technology in our own environment. We can in a way that is not separate from the interpersonal communication space like many other technologies.Augmented reality is not separate from place. It is place. Place matters because it turns out that that most real-world thinking actually occurs in the real world. Not only that, but it happens in specific and complex environments with practical goals that relies on the interaction with, feedback from, and manipulation of real stuff.
—
Photos of of kids and StarWalk iPhone app from Gizmodo
A Match Made in Fantasy Land: Disney & Augmented Reality
August 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Actually, it’s in Tomorrowland at Disneyland, but it is more appropriate for Todayland if there was such a place. Augmented Reality is showing up in lots of places. Every step gets us closer to the a time when people get over the gizmo phase and move into some truly engaging, educational and prosocial uses.
With a little imagination, never in short supply at Disneyland, you can imagine how this type of display can make a huge difference in a classroom, allowing subjects like history, geography, science, and math to be immersive, interactive and truly experiential. Disney has an augmented reality mirror that lets kids try on virtual outfits without the need of a dressing room. Going a step beyond some online apps, like Fashionista, the clothes in the Disney AR mirror actually move with the viewer’s body. (Personally, my favorite is the Storm Trooper outfit.)
Layar has made an AR guide for Disneyland parks–cool and very handy. But I’m waiting to see apps where the imagination of the user can interact with the environment and spark a new generation of the love of learning and exploration. This type of technology is an extraordinarily exciting way to approach cognition and learning. Howard Gardner‘s (1993) work on multiple intelligences and work by multiple positive psychologists, such as Csikszentmihalyi (Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider & Shernoff, 2003) and Bandura (1999), provides a guideline for how to achieve engagement, intrinsic motivation, relevance, and foster self-directed learning.
—
Bandura, A. (1999). Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective. Asian Journal Of Social Psychology, 2(1), 21-41.
Gardner, H. (1993). Frames of Mind. New York: Basic Books.
Shernoff, D. J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Schneider, B., & Shernoff, E. S. (2003). Student Engagement in High School Classrooms from the Perspective of Flow Theory.
Prosocial Augmented Reality: Celebrating Youth Achievement
July 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
It’s time we started using our power through choices and media technologies to promote the behaviors we want to see–not those we can’t help but see or wish we hadn’t. Let’s use the excitement and engagement of emerging technologies—such as augmented reality—for prosocial ends. Let’s celebrate achievement, such as the fifth grade chorus from Staten Island, instead of outliers, like LeBron James’ basketball contract or irresponsibility and bad behavior, like Lindsay Lohan’s jail sentence. We are long overdue to take some responsibility for the media content we choose to support. Let your remotes and wallets do the talking instead of your mouth. Media has to potential to create images for aspiration and inspiration, not in looks, but in substance. We can choose to support media technologies that affirm what we want to be as individuals and as a society, instead of looking for others to blame for what “media does to us.” Believe me, media outlets pay lots of attention to how you cast your eyeballs.
The August issue of Time Out New York Kids is a perfect example. It celebrates the achievements of the Webby-Award-winning fifth grade chorus from Staten Island with an augmented reality enhancement. By viewing the magazine cover with a mobile device, such as an iPhone or a Droid with Internet access, and the freely downloadable Junaio augmented reality mobile phone app, you can experience a jubilant performance clip of the chorus on video.
This is much more important news to discuss and celebrate than LeBron James’ NBA team choice. LeBron is a great example of hardwork, but the probability of having the right opportunity, work ethic, and genetic talent to achieve at his level is about .01%. That’s not 1%–it’s 100 times LESS than that, or 1 out of 10,000.
Yet, according to a 2008 study of black youths ages 13-18, 70% planned on careers in the NBA. No big surprise that’s an attractive dream. For the 2009-2010 season, the minimum salary was $457,588 and the average salary was $3.4 million. Each year, 50,000 African-American boys play high school basketball, but less than 50 will make the NBA. To put it in perspective, the average NBA basketball arena has approximately 20,000 seats, so imagine that all the seats are filled with basketball players that showed up to play, but they only let 1 player at every OTHER game onto the floor–and he may not even get to start. All the rest get to go home, many unprepared to take advantage of other career opportunities.
Celebrating other achievements, such as the P.S. 22 Chorus, emphasizes opportunities that can be available to all kids. Participation is this kind of activity not only teaches about the activity–music, singing, beat, and teamwork in this case– but it demonstrates much more valuable lessons:
- learning takes time
- it is cumulative
- it is about effort not luck
Research by shows that when we believe that our abilities can change with efforts, we try harder, and that when we have confidence in ourselves, and believe in our ability to act on our own behalf, we are more resilient and take more risks. Today’s youth are facing a world where change is the rule rather than the exception. They need much more than the ability to read, write and do simple math. They need the emotional resilience and cognitive flexibility to adapt to a changing environment and meet it as a challenge not an obstacle. It’s great that LeBron James has had such success and I’m happy for him, but the kids at PS 22 make much better role models.
—
Photo by AWE Photo/Jan Somm-Hammel. Retrieved from http://www.silive.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2009/09/ps_22_chorus_scores_30000_from.html
I’m ready for my iPhone 4; so is junaio Glue
July 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I’m still waiting for my iPhone 4 to ship. I do have some trepidations because 1) I hate to be a guinea pig with the first generation of any technology, and 2) I’m hearing stories about AT&T problems (how can a phone designed for AT&T have problems with their network? Should I have waited for the Verizon version?). Nevertheless, curiosity and apps like Junaio Glue pushed me over the edge and I put in the order at the end of June when they released. The best thing about being a media psychologist is that we can justify pretty much any technology purchase.
junaio Glue combines geo-location features with camera recognition to improve the accuracy of information delivery. It won’t be long before we see AR popping up (pun-intended) to support all kinds of marketing and information services, not just those who can invest big bucks. Developers can create their own junaio Glue channels because metaio has an Open API.
