Augmented Reality and Google Earth Buildings

I was trying to keep one of my latest Personal Learning Network discoveries on the QT until the Geographical Associations Conference next week. But as I’ve already shown it to a few people at the Innovative Teachers forum and I also talked about it last week at Teachmeet North East London. So I thought it was about time for a blog post - before Alan beats me to it!

I’ve blogged about Augmented Reality before (and here). I think it has the potential to be the next evolving technology in education. It will also serve to bridge the gap for teachers between the virtual world learning spaces and real world learning spaces. In simple terms, augmented reality turns an augmented reality code into 3D virtual objects. This has huge potential to be used in education.

Anyway, it is now possible to extract some buildings for Google Earth and make them appear right in front of you. I tried it out with a few of the children from MGS just before I left and they couldn’t believe it.

The Augmented Reality viewer uses ARsights that is currently a free download. You need to have a web cam attached for it to work. The better the webcam the better the results. It’s very simple to use – first of all you need to download the AR sights Software, then a placemark (this is basically a bar code) and then you need to pick a 3D model from inside Google Earth. All the instructions are on the AR Sights website.

I’ll let you work out the rest yourself – but here’s a quick screencast (sorry forgot to turn the sound off!) to show how it works. I’ve used the Sydney Opera House as an example.

Even though only some of the 3D buildings are available at the moment in Google Earth – I can already see this free off the shelf resource being used to teach place, compare urban areas, support tourism studies, look at the shape of buildings and for virtual fieldwork. Its very impressive stuff!

Comments

[Neil Adam]

Hi Ollie. Great idea isn't it. Interesting how "augmented reality" term is being subverted. (Not your fault.) AR should be about augmenting a view of the real world with some form of digital overlay. this kind of AR (and the GE version http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality)doesn't do that as far as I can see

[OllieBray]

I see your point - what do you think we sould call this type of technology? OB

[David]

My son produced a video on the GE augmented reality demo

http://www.digmo.co.uk/edu/ge-augmented-reality-demo/

we had a great afternoon playing with the site.

[Rosie MacAlpine]

I rushed out to get a webcam in my lunch break, and have spent the last hour playing with this! Fantastic, can't wait to share it.