Augmented Reality – A Possible Game-Changer in Education

The current presentation is focused on the Augmented Reality realities, from the point of view of a software developer and educator in 2015. The Augmented Reality (AR) is a concept which already has enough history and background to be taken into consideration as an important contender inside the modern education space. Even though the highly profiled and debated Google Glass project has come to an abrupt end, the Augmented Reality universe went on with diverse and brilliant developments such as applications and/or devices from MagicLeap, Oculus Rift or Microsoft HoloLens. While the main concept of Augmented Reality is actually present within the public consciousness for quite some time now, it remains unfortunately on a very low profile from the point of view of actual meaningful uses. The past year, 2014, could have triggered a significant advance from this point of view. Important advances in sensor technology and hardware generally came to aid with the actual uses of Augmented Reality applications: better precision of the location-based information, better image recognition capabilities, better ways to work in diverse environments and lots of very powerful mobile devices (some of our modern smartphones are actually significantly more powerful than a mainstream personal computer built just several years ago). In order to make the Augmented Reality a widely used solution for a better overall educational system, we have to follow some guidelines in order to obtain something that is really meaningful and not just an engineering or development feat with not much real-world application. After studying and analyzing different theories and considerations related to this aspect, I have settled on a set of seven guidelines for developing educational Augmented Reality applications: build something out of the ordinary, if you just replicate something that is already available, and maybe even in an easier or more accessible form, there are very low chances of success; take into account the application of the software, if you replicate something that can be very easily done without resorting to augmented reality, why should you? – look for an application in cases where there is a real difficulty to put the student into a real-life situation and so the augmented reality is obviously the better solution; keep the actual scientific content of the application into a visual form as much as possible, if we just open lots of text pages on a screen it would have no advantage over a classic book, which in turn does not run out of battery power; always put yourself in the shoes of your students, do not try to build the perfect application for you, but for your students who do not know the things you present inside the application; try to use and reuse the available resources in order to combine them into the Augmented Reality universe, in order to provide a natural environment for the students and decrease costs in the same time; test the application as much as possible, involve the students in the development process because the Augmented Reality is something that is not exactly defined at this moment and, even though they might be enthusiastic about it, their expectation can be very different from yours; have realistic expectations, not everybody will love your brand new Augmented Reality and not everyone will be keen to use it, an Augmented Reality application is not something meant to replace the previous teaching methods but actually has to be combined with them as an important and modern support tool.