New Augmented Reality Applications - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 369

Figure 2. Example of patterns or markers used in Augmented Reality

devoted to this area (Bimber & Raskar, 2005;
Cawood & Fiala, 2008). However and despite its
maturity, AR has been barely applied to education.
Many processes, ideas and concepts can be
better illustrated using both images of the real
world and graphics. Think for example of an ar-
chitecture student looking at a building. We may
let him look at different floor plans at the same
time. A different but much better approach uses
AR to superimpose the internal structure on the
building so that he can understand why it will not
collapse. In this Section we present the benefits of
using AR in education. We also survey previous
work in the same area.

For students to learn more and better, educa-
tion has to be both experimental and interactive.
We learn more from hands-on experiences than
from traditional lectures. Also, collaboration and
discussions between students help their educa-
tion by teaching them opinions and methods
proposed by their peers. This is more interesting
for science and engineering students. However,
other disciplines like law may benefit from new
technologies, for example using teleconferencing
to attend or participate in remote trials. AR is
mature enough to be applied to many every-day
activities. Education is one of them, especially
for the following reasons (Billinghurst, 2002):

Importance of Applying
Augmented Reality to education

• AR supports seamless interaction between

real and virtual environments,

• AR allows using a tangible interface meta-

phor for object manipulation, and University teaching has not evolved much for

centuries. The method of attending lectures, taking
notes and taking a final exam dates back to the
15th and 16th centuries. Recently, new technolo-
gies have appeared in the classroom. For example,
it is common to see PowerPoint presentations
and use networked platforms like Moodle (Cole
& Foster, 2007). Using these new technologies
does not imply an increased interaction between
students and the professor. In fact, many times
information keeps on flowing in just one direction
from the professor to the students.

• AR provides the ability to transition

smoothly between reality and virtual
worlds.

AR can also be used for online education.
Project MARIE ( Multimedia Augmented Real-
ity Interface for E-Learning ) uses AR to present
3D information to the students (Liarokapis et
al., 2002). The authors argue that AR is more
effective than VEs in terms of price, realism and
interactivity. They also predict that AR will be
used in many every-day applications in ten years.