February 2008 — Features
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When Worlds Collide: An Augmented Reality Check
Researchers are ramping up traditional MUVEs, developing games that require students to uncover solutions in spaces where the real mingles with the virtual.
NOAH PATEL REMEMBERS the first time aliens descended on his math class at Thomas A. Edison Middle School in Brighton, MA.
The extraterrestrial buggers showed up
unannounced, and Patel's students had to
figure out why. Armed with handheld
computers, teams of determined students
set out to the school's football field to meet
the intruders face-to-face. The computers,
preprogrammed with specific GPS coordinates,
revealed various clues via text,
video, and audio as students wandered
over particular spots on the field. Over the
course of an hour, the students pieced
together viable theories on why the Green
Meanies were there.
"We were provided with a 'CIA' briefing talking about the suspicious landing that had taken place," Patel says. "We told the students they were going to be a part of very important research with Harvard and MIT, and that there were only a handful of kids worldwide who would have this opportunity."
No, the aliens weren't real. But neither were they figments of overactive adolescent imaginations. Instead they were the central fictional figures in an experimental learning tool created by a team of researchers drawn from a number of higher education institutions. The tool, dubbed Alien Contact!, is the leading example of augmented reality, a new strategy to enhance math and literacy curricula in K-12 districts across the country.
The technology is simple: Mobile technologies such as handheld computers and global positioning systems work in sync to create an alternate, hybrid world that mixes virtual characters with the actual physical environment. The result is a digital simulation that offers powerful game-playing opportunities. Matt Dunleavy, assistant professor of instructional technology at Virginia's Radford University, says that augmented reality is a step forward from conventional multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), which exist exclusively in virtual space.
"It's an exciting one-two punch of virtual reality in the real world," says Dunleavy. "Teachers talk about making learning fun all the time, but this strategy gets students out of the classroom and into an environment where learning actually is fun."
As a postgraduate student at Harvard University in 2005 and 2006, Dunleavy worked with researchers from MIT and the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a special venture known as the Handheld Augmented Reality Project, or HARP. Alien Contact! was the initial result of their research; since then, a number of other games have been moved along into development.
