Visitors to the historic site of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas have long sought to escape the present and place themselves into a moment of history. But it’s easy to forget that the structure that currently stands isn’t the real thing.

“A lot of the movies and things show the Alamo church as kind of beaten up and rumpled down,” said Michael McGar, President of Alamo Reality. “After the battle, Santa Anna had a general stay behind and destroy the building and the fort itself so that it couldn’t be used again. But all the drawings and photographs, and particularly photographs, which didn’t exist at that time, they show the Alamo beat up like that.”

But now there’s a way that visitors can explore the old church the way it was. Or, at least they can come close. McGar and his team at Alamo Reality have spent the last year recreating the Alamo in 3D to be viewed in an augmented reality mobile app.

“If you’re standing at the Alamo,” McGar said, “and you choose the location where Crockett defended the Alamo, you’re standing there, you look on your iPad, your phone, and you see a portal pop up on your screen. There’s a doorway into 1836.”

McGar’s History with the Alamo

It all started when McGar was chatting with his colleague Leslie Komet Ausburn.

“Back in ’94, ’95, I built a CD-ROM set about the Alamo and we were the first production company to shoot inside the Alamo since 1906. We created a virtual Alamo,” McGar said. Ausburn encouraged him to do it again, but with more modern technology. At first McGar was skeptical.

“I said, ‘Oh well it’s really hard, it was a very hard thing to do.’ [Ausburn] said, ‘Well, if you did it again, how would you do it?’ And I said, ‘Well Pokemon Go just came out, imagine if you could stand at the Alamo and watch Davy Crockett defend his position at the same spot where he did, where he fought in the battle.’ And she goes, okay you’ve got to do it. That’s it. So, we kind of put things together, went out and found funding and built it.”

For the 3D design of the fort, McGar and his company hired Gary Zaboly. “He’s famous for knowing the Alamo better than anyone else and having drawn images of the Alamo for decades,” McGar said. “His drawings, actually, are on the placards surrounding the Alamo to explain what the Alamo looked like in 1836. He has direct source material down to writings and drawings of the Alamo at the time period, and that’s where we got our inspiration and our facts. He found a drawing of one of the captains who was in the battle, a drawing of the building exactly as it was during the battle, and that’s what we used for our understanding of the battle. There were crenellations at the top of the church, like an old medieval fort with the square blocks at the top. It looks totally different than what most people think it looks like.”

“Additionally we have Dr. Stephen Hardin who is a historian who’s written multiple books about the Texan revolution and also about the Alamo and his writings and his research down to original documents. We always go back to original documents, original evidence, and archaeological digs. We aren’t taking stories from John Wayne movies.”

How it Works

You download the app and open it up. As you travel around the site, different portals will appear. “The application has about eleven hours of content in it, so it’s not a small thing.” These eleven hours include perspectives from Texans, African Americans, Spaniards, the French, the Chicanos, and Indigenous Americans.

“If you’re on the Alamo grounds, there’s fourteen different locations that you can see the fort itself, and then you can also see the battle happen. Each of those locations, though, has content underneath that location, so you can see biographies of the people who were at that location, you can see additional movies about what happened at that location, and sometimes there are stories that happened at that location, it isn’t just what happened during the battle, things that happened before the battle, several different types of stories that are really interesting, that you wouldn’t get otherwise, standing at the Alamo.”

You can also use the app without visiting San Antonio. To help with off-site use, Alamo Reality has developed a small, map which will be available next month. View the map through the app on your phone, and a small scale model of the Alamo will display in 3D. The company is also currently developing trading cards of historic figures. These figures also will display in 3D with the app and even interact with one another when placed in close proximity.

A New Way to Explore Historical Sites

In terms of AR in education, Alamo Reality’s app is the first of its kind. “I mean generally speaking with AR,” McGar said, “everybody gets excited if you look through your camera and see something in the foreground wiggling. But to tell full-blown stories and to take somebody into the amount of content and the amount of depth that we have, that is unprecedented. When we first started to do it, it was like, can we really do this? Nobody’s done it, there’s a lot to do, and we sat down with our technical team and we figured it out.”

“As a former college professor, I honestly think this is going to change education. The engagement level, the ability for kids to choose, you don’t have to be at the Alamo to have that experience of the portal. You can walk through a portal anywhere in the world. If you’re at the Alamo, you get the added pleasure of standing at the spot where it happened, but I can also walk through the Alamo every day in my backyard. I just go and I click on the spot where I want to see and I walk right into it. And so I can see kids exploring that and finding things that they never would have thought about. It’s all at full scale. So if I’m standing next to a wall that’s 23 feet high, you look up 23 feet up to see the top of that wall. It’s astounding.”

The post Experience the Alamo Like It’s 1836 with Alamo Reality’s New AR App appeared first on eLearningInside News.

While it made a significantly bigger splash in 2017, in recent months, virtual reality (VR) has given ground to augmented reality (AR), especially in the education space. Last week, we reported how a Western Michigan Professor of Aviation has helped create an AR simulation of a plane’s anatomy along with a flight simulator. AR has also demonstrated uses in the field of medicine. Professors and students at Imperial College London recently used AR in the operating theater to see a person’s x-ray superimposed on their skin.

When it comes to AR, there’s a distinction to be drawn. Some efforts truly make use of the new technology, allowing educators and learners to approach old material in new ways that were previously impossible. Other implementations of AR use the technology because it’s shiny. True, engagement is always a primary concern in any education, and new technology can certainly boost a learner’s interest. And a few of the following examples hit both marks. We’ll let you decide just how innovative these following uses of AR in the classroom can be.

AR Chemical Plant Operations at the University of Rochester

As part of a recent chemical engineering course at U of R, a few students were invited into a small room with a glass table covered with coffee mugs and popsicle sticks. The mugs represented 10 cubic meter reactors while the popsicle sticks became pipes that connected them. Students could also access a nob that could control the temperature inside each reactor. That chemicals that mixed virtually within these reactors were represented down to the molecule.

“We’re trying to use AR as a way to enable new types of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) undergraduate laboratories that weren’t possible before,” said Andrew White, assistant professor of chemical engineering in a statement.

“What we’ve done is build a hands-on, tactile, collaborative lab where students can explore putting together multiple reactors at different temperatures, and see what effect this has on optimizing a chemical reaction.”

The team who developed the chemical plant simulation hopes to connect it to the university’s mainframe and allow for more simulations with more complicated factors. As a next project, they hope to represent the fallout from oil spills.

(As an aside, Professor White is a big believer in open educational resources (OED). He’s uploaded all of his lectures and educational material to Jupyter Notebook.)

An AR App for Speech Pathology

One major aspect of speech pathology is phonetics. To become a professional in the field, learners need to be able to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a universally-recognized system of symbols that correlate to the various sounds of human speech. Speech pathologists need to be able to use the IPA to transcribe a patients’ speech.

Two professors along with a team of undergrads at Baldwin Wallace University have begun to develop an AR app to test students on their use of the IPA. Much like Pokemon Go, as students walk around, different IPA transcription challenges will materialize.

“We’re hoping that we can build upon a variety of different interfaces to do a whole bunch of different things,” Professor Andrew Watkins, who teaches computer science, told The Exponent, the student paper.  “Maybe it’s learning this material.  Maybe it’s helping clinicians train.  It just depends on where we can go from there, but for right now, this is sort of our beginning project on how we could use augmented reality technology in Speech-Language Pathology training.”

A Silicon Valley Startup Will Distribute AR Teaching Tools to Myanmar Schools

360ed, an effort from the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley think tank, has developed a few AR based learning modules to teach English to 1^st graders, and to teach biology and chemistry to 10^th graders.

The teaching aids consist of a series of flash cards. When a learner scans the cards with his or her mobile device, three-dimensional images will appear, helping learners memorize the words of a new languages, molecular structures, and the building blocks of life.

“I hope children’s learning process and understanding will improve over what they try to learn by heart,” said U Yan Min Aung, managing director for 360ed, according to the Myanmar Times.

Honorable Mention: A VR Sim to Help Med Students Treat Patients with PTSD

No, it’s not AR, but it’s a pretty cool idea. Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is still a poorly understood condition that requires extreme dexterity on the part of the psychologist when treating a patient.

A psychology professor at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, Skip Rizzo, has developed a VR simulation that puts students in front of virtual patients. “It gives novice clinicians a chance to mess up a bunch with a virtual patient, before they get their hands on a live one,” Rizzo said, according to JAMA.

Some of these applications of new technology are really innovative. We’re very excited to see where AR ends up in 2018.

The post Some Recent Educational Uses of AR Innovate; Others Catch a Ride on the Bandwagon appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Computer simulations are nothing new in the field of aviation education. But a new partnership between Western Michigan University and Microsoft is taking that one big step further. Microsoft has selected Lori Brown, an associate professor of aviation at WMU, to test out their new HoloLens, the world’s first self-contained holographic computer. The augmented reality interface will bring students a little closer to the realities of flight.

When it comes to the use of innovative technology in the classroom, this is by no means Professor Brown’s first rodeo. She has spent years researching the uses of virtual and augmented reality in aviation education.

“In the past 16 years that I’ve been teaching advanced aircraft systems, I have identified many gaps in the tools and equipment available to me as a professor. Ultimately, mixed reality bridges the gap between simulation, the aircraft and the classroom,” Brown told WMU News.

Using the HoloLens to Fly a Plane and See Inside It

At the moment, Brown and her team have incorporated the HoloLense with WMU’s CRJ-200 flight simulator. They are currently designing a further simulation for the Federal Aviation Administration that will help pilots prepare for and respond to changing weather scenarios.

They have also already created JetXplore, which allows students to intimately explore the parts of a plane. “I wanted my students to be able to see inside and interact with aircraft components such as a turbofan engine,” says Brown. “When I saw that the medical community was using HoloLens to allow students to see inside the human body, I realized that HoloLens could augment my lab. The ability to see inside an engine is similar to seeing the bones of a human body.” Brown wants to recreate that app with an entire virtual airport.

“Technologies like this bring forth a new medium for aviation training, a new paradigm of mixed reality, where for the first time, we have the ability to take the analog world and superimpose digital artifacts and create mixed reality aviation simulations,” Brown says. “Unlike other advanced technologies, HoloLens is intuitive and offers a natural means of interaction. There’s no mouse, wire or touch screen. All you need are simple gestures to create and alter holograms, your voice to communicate with apps, and your eyes to navigate and analyze content. With the HoloLens, students are able to see inside the jet engine while also interacting with the engine components and full flight deck. They’re developing muscle memory, which increases retention.”

Use of the HoloLens comes with being recognized by Microsoft for its Women in Mixed Reality Spotlight Partner Program. She was also featured last fall at the company’s Mixed Reality Academy and has recently received WMU’s Innovative Teaching award.

Using the HoloLens in Surgery

Microsoft’s HoloLens has already been used to aid in surgeon training and actual surgery. In a recent effort conducted by Imperial College London, surgeons superimposed CT scans over a patient’s limb in the operating theater, allowing them to ‘see’ the fractured bone in place.

“We are one of the first groups in the world to use the HoloLens successfully in the operating theatre,” said Philip Pratt, a research fellow at Imperial College London, according to The Indian Express. “Through this initial series of patient cases we have shown that the technology is practical, and that it can provide a benefit to the surgical team,” said Pratt, lead author of the study published in the journal European Radiology Experimental.

The development edition of the HoloLens was released in the spring of 2016, but it has yet to come to market in a consumer version. Its adoption has begun to accelerate recently, and it stands as an alternative to VR that is better suited to many tasks.

The post A WMU Professor Is Using Microsoft’s HoloLens AR Technology to Teach Aviation appeared first on eLearningInside News.