By mtgwork February 8, 2013
SCARLET+, User Testing
Augmented Reality, demonstration, iPad, junaio, pedagogy, student experience

On 25th January the Crafts Study Centre augmented reality (AR) app was introduced to 2nd year students on the Contextual and Theoretical Perspectives course at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. The SCARLET+ lead academic, Adrian Bland (and Pathway Tutor for the course) introduced the project to the students and then they had the following brief introduction to AR:

[gigya src=”http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” style=”position:absolute” width=”500″ height=”364″ bgcolor=”#ffffff” flashvars=”prezi_id=mewlfkbikpeq&lock_to_path=0&color=ffffff&autoplay=no&autohide_ctrls=0″]

The Prezi can also be accessed here: http://prezi.com/mewlfkbikpeq/introduction-to-ar/

Most useful about the session was the opportunity to ask students questions about augmented reality. The key points were:

• prior to the presentation none of the students said they’d heard of AR
• after the presentation students were asked if they owned suitable mobile or tablet devices, the vast majority (approx. 24/30**) of the students did not have the right devices
• about one third of students (approx. 10/30**) would be interested in visiting the Crafts Study Centre to make use of one of the devices in the Gallery
• one student commented that they would like to use it, as a non-programmer, to create their own AR apps
• another couple of students commented that a AR app may lock-down research by making it either one-sided in its perspective or making it too easy for the researcher
• several students felt they would be missing out by not owning the devices themselves, they wanted to know how they could access the content otherwise
• one student asked who was going to spend the time creating the content for the app – the lecturer? – the student commented that this would be time consuming for the lecturer

My own perspective on the session  was that I was surprised that the students brought up issues that had already been discussed at the workshop amongst academics and other staff. I was hoping that more of the students might have owned a compatible device but not surprised by this result as we were aware of this as a risk.

Jean Vacher, Institutional Lead for SCARLET+ at UCA, followed up this session with a short introduction to the Crafts Study Centre collections on 1st February.

We are now working to develop another version of the AR app during February.

** there were approximately 30 students in attendance, statistics are rough estimates