Radford Outdoor Augmented Reality
(ROAR) Project
When the bell rings, the eager eighth-grade science students pour out of the building with their cell phones and gather around their science teacher. The teacher explains that the day’s lesson will require them to investigate the causes of a beached whale. As the students exchange quizzical looks, one of them asks, “Are we going on a field trip to the beach?” “No,” the teacher responds, “the beach is coming to us.”
She instructs them to turn on their Global-Positioning-System-enabled cellphones to begin the lesson. As they do so, digital characters and items begin to appear on their computer screens. Wandering across the playground, the students meet marine biologists and fishermen who provide data and information that help them solve the mystery of the beached whale. Nearing the water fountain, a video file of Orca whales hunting begins to play on the computers. A captain’s log of sonar tests in the surrounding waters is revealed behind the swing sets. Across the once-familiar playground, students rush to discover multiple data points leading them down the path of scientific inquiry.
Introduction
While the scenario described above may seem fantastic, the Radford Outdoor Augmented Reality (ROAR) Project proposes to explore the feasibility of just such an instructional model. Building upon Matt Dunleavy’s previous work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Radford University, in collaboration with MIT and HP Labs, will develop and study elementary, middle and high school curricula that use augmented reality (AR) to deliver instruction. The narrative-driven, inquiry-based AR simulations developed by the ROAR team will be played on a HP iPAQ Travel Companion rx5915 handheld computer (Figure 1) and use GPS technology to correlate the students’ real world location to their virtual location in the simulation’s digital world.
This type of mediated immersion infuses digital resources throughout a real physical environment, augmenting students’ experiences and interactions and providing interactive, situated, and collaborative problem solving learning opportunities. The cyber-enabled learning made possible by location-aware AR expands the current understanding of classroom boundaries by embedding the physical environment outside of school with digital scientific inquiry challenges.
As the students move around a physical location, such as their school playground or sports fields (Figure 2), a map on their handheld displays digital objects and virtual people who exist in an AR world superimposed on real space (Figure 3). When students come within approximately 10 feet of these digital artifacts, the AR (Mscape and MIT) and GPS software triggers video, audio, and text files, which provide narrative, navigation and collaboration cues as well as academic challenges. This capability parallels the new means of information gathering, communication, and expression made possible by emerging interactive media (such as Web-enabled, GPS equipped cell phones with text messaging, video, and camera features).
challenges.
Interested in being part of the ROAR Team?
ROAR in the News...
THE Journal Article about AR and ROAR
eSchool News article about AR
Harvard Graduate School of Education news article
One day at school...
This HP video provides a vision of a possible future for augmented reality gaming. Some of the technologies seen in this video are still in development.
Research Articles
Dunleavy, M. Dede, C. & Mitchell, R. (2008). Affordances and limitations of immersive participatory augmented reality simulations for teaching and learning. Journal of Science Education and Technology.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-0822302.
The ROAR project is collaborating with the Learning without Boundaries project sponsored by the Governor’s Productivity Investment Fund Project with the Virginia Department of Education.
