EAGER: Augmented Reality for Understanding Social and Environmental Science

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project is an experiment to introduce Augmented Reality (AR)to new platforms. AR is an exciting emerging technology that overlays geographically registered three dimensional computer graphics on the real world. Until recently, AR required expensive hardware, or, at the minimum, a laptop computer equipped with a web camera. Recent improvements in cellular telephone technology, however, have enabled the possibility to use a smart phone as an interaction device for AR thus creating a portable AR experience. By using the cell phone as a "magic lens", participants can view the real world through the camera on the phone and see the augmentations in place, in registration with the real world. In this project the research team will create a demonstration of how Augmented Reality can aid in understanding and teaching social and environmental science. The interdisciplinary, collaborative team of researchers will develop and demonstrate a sample scenario for using AR environments to teach archaeology at the collegiate level. Archaeology was chosen for a variety of reasons. Archaeology has a very physical component and deals largely with three dimensional objects and thus is a good match of needs with the capabilities that AR provides. One problem in teaching archaeology is that the processes and methods of field research are difficult to present in a classroom, and many students will never get the opportunity to engage in field research, and those who do will be limited to only a few different sites. The project team hypothesizes that AR-based simulations will be suitable to expose students to what is involved in field work and to enable them to participate in a wide variety of simulated sites. To address the challenge of teaching field work techniques, we seek to create an immersive, interactive demonstration in which students use AR environments to "excavate" sites, interpret artifacts, and create a reconstruction of an overall site. Such an AR environment will include many aspects of actual field work, including excavation methods, strategic analysis (e.g., where to look next), systematic recording of the field data, imaginative reconstruction of 3D artifacts, and interpretation of evidence from multiple sources. Archaeology field work has a considerable amount of physical activity, and the nature of AR is that there is a strong physical aspect to its use. The project team suspects that a smart phone is a suitable interaction device because it is a device familiar to most students and it is of a size such that a student can carry it like any other archaeological tool, such as a trowel or a brush. This is a proof of concept project, that AR can be implemented through a smart phone and used in a classroom setting to communicate critical scientific methodologies and concepts, in this case surrounding the discipline of archaeology. However, the implication of this project are quite extensive, e.g., virtual classrooms on small platforms in remote rural communities and field site access to virtual zoological and lithics collections.