ALT-C 2011 – Day 1 Unlocking the Hidden Curriculum

The “Best Performance of the First Day of ALT-C 2011d”-award goes without a doubt to Dale Porter from the University of Exeter. Although I’ve seen (and used) plenty of examples of Augmented Reality both using markers and without markers (for example using Layar), I really liked the way he presented the example. He used one of the participants to perform a “magic trick”. He had her fix a marker on her body while he put on his magicians coat, but while talking he decides to take of the coat again and needs another volunteer who need to hold the coat in front of the participant with the marker. He then made sure the AR software was running on his laptop, aimed it right, had all of us count down from 4 after which the coat could be removed. On the image projected from his laptop we could see the first participant with a number of organs projected on her body. Tadaa! 🙂
Great show.

Dale also provided a number of additional resources which I’m going to list here for those that don’t have access to the conference system:

  • Link to their showreel video of how they’re using the technology at the University of Exeter.
  • Project blog.
  • Set of Toolkit resources, designed to help others create AR education applications.
  •  Instructional fact sheet on the ‘Hoppala Augmentation’ service, offering a graphical web interface to create augmented reality contents with just a few mouseclicks.
  •  Video showing feedback from educationalists during their Toolkit day on campus.
  • Project Twitter account