The New Reality
You’re in 5th grade, on your way to school. You walk down a crowded urban street, gazing at skyrises, cars, bikes, people flashing by, the blue sky overhead. With each building, a bubble appears in your vision. If you press it, a list of categories show up, including the history, construction, and current use of the structure. You may stray your finger over a category and the information is either revealed or sent to your phone or laptop to be looked at later. When you see the sky, the weather bubble appears. You may choose to press this, or not, and the bubble will fade away within 3 seconds. All the while, you see arrows pointing the way to school, and can hear the voice of a GPS reinforcing which way to go. Arriving at school, you enter the building and see familiar faces. For those whom you’ve talked to for at least one minute, you’re prompted by your ear piece to wave and maintain eye contact for at least 1 second. This is helpful, as you struggle with social anxiety and eye contact is one of your fears that you need to be exposed to to overcome. You manage to say hi to two children and are congratulated with a “ Great effort!” in your ear piece. Smiling, your small figure enters class.
Later you are struggling with a math problem. After looking at it for 10 minutes, you see a bubble appear and press it. Similar problems with smaller numbers appear on your desk, and you write in the answers with your fingers. Now you know the logic for the problem on the paper and are able to solve it quickly.
Back to the real you. How was that? Did you find the experience intriguing and exciting or scary and disturbing? Perhaps both? How does such technology bode with your moral compass? Such are the questions we must tackle as we advance with augmented reality, or AR. What is this mysterious technology? In his article “How Augmented Reality Works”, Kevin Bonsor states, “Augmented reality adds graphics, sounds, haptic feedback, and smell to the natural world as it exists”(How Augmented Reality Works). Although the experience that I wrote about a 5th grader using AR is fictitious, we must not discount it as an impossible phenomenon. Tomi Ahonen, author of 12 books on the mobile industry, predicts that by 2020 there will be 1 billion users of AR worldwide and that the count will increase to 2.5 billion users by 2023 (Wassom 14). This would mean that by 2020, 1/7th of the world could be consumers of augmented reality devices. Therefore it is quite important to follow today’s progress in AR. Anything with that much influence must be censured to ensure that it influences the world to its benefit and not to its detriment.
If Ahonen predicts AR to become so widespread within three years, then where is it at now? Well, AR has already begun to permeate our lives. Some apps that many in America use daily are actually forms of augmented reality. Want to know where AR is living in your life? Check out this video:
Now that you know of some AR hiding in plain sight, let’s move on to those with less of a spotlight, specifically in education and communication. The Pilot, created by Waverly Labs, is one example of current AR technology that adds sounds to our world (Ochoa). It is a set of earpieces that translate languages real time, as people speak to one another. As of now only English, Spanish, French and Italian will be in available in the package. However, other languages will be introduced in the future. If connected to visual augmented reality devices, the technology for recognizing and translating speech could be used to communicate with one’s device, experience immediate audio translation, and display subtitles on daily life conversations.
The idea of using subtitles for conversations is explored by the Live Time Closed Captioning System, LTCCS, created by New York teenager Daniil Frants in 2015 (Frants). LTCCS displays the text on a small screen that can be attached to one’s glasses. In this way, individuals with hearing impairment may read what those around them are saying on the screen, and respond quickly.
The Pilot and LTCCS have the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate. According to the National Center for Education Statistics,whose studies pertain to the USA, “Students who speak a language other than English at home and speak English with difficulty may be in need of special services. In 2007, an estimated 11 million elementary and secondary students, or 21 percent of all such students, spoke a language other than English at home” (Status and Trends). Perhaps an augmented reality device would be useful in supplementing these students’ learning. Others may argue that it could prevent students from learning English by essentially having everything in the student’s native language. Further research must be done to see the best way to implement this technology in a way that benefits but does not hinder one’s learning. Regardless of its use, being able to both hear and see another person’s words in one’s own language while the conversant speaks their respective language could amply bridge the language barrier. Similarly, as we discover the ways people with auditory processing disorders process conversations, we may be able to have earpieces that translate or reiterate pieces of conversations when the person’s disorder has caused them to miss out on the flow of conversation.
To further speculate, what if the visual augmented reality recognized sign language and relayed its meaning to the user via subtitles as well as speech? Pioneering such research are University of Washington undergraduates Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor. Azodi and Pryor recently won the Lemelson MIT prize for creating SignAloud. SignAloud are gloves that analyze one’s hand movements for sign language and consequently “speak” the words out loud for the user. If one interwove the Pilot,the LTCCS, and SignAloud together, communication between people of different hearing abilities and language backgrounds would become almost seamless.
As suggested in the experience of the 5th grader, augmented reality can be used for education. An interesting implementation of this concept is the Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair, AMAR, that Steve Henderson and Steven Feiner from the Columbia University Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab have created. This research project resulted in a headset that recognizes the materials and tools the user is facing and then displays instructions on armored military vehicle maintenance. Imagine how this would be helpful for students doing physics, chemistry, or mechanical work. Technology like AMAR gives students the freedom to create without being slowed down by the process of constantly looking through manuals to see how materials/tools are used. Instead, the relevant information would be displayed instantly in their vision.
Already there are apps one can download on one’s iPad in order to practice AR in education. Elements4D, an app on the Apple Store, allows users to manipulate 3D models of a cube that represents an element on the periodic table (Apple). When dragging the cubes on the screen so that they touch, students can see the chemical reactions that occur when these elements come into contact. Students in schools with iPads have greatly benefited from the flexible learning styles that similar augmented reality apps permit. However, there can be problems with maintenancing ipads, and there is debate over whether giving every student an ipad would deny them the opportunity to develop skills writing with pen and paper. Furthermore, iPads are costly. Hence their apps are not commonly used for public education in America. The up and coming android AR apps may become preferable and influential due to the their lesser financial burden.
There is much to be done in augmented reality. Perhaps one day our 5th graders will be guided by these devices. Could they freely converse with those who speak languages they cannot comprehend? Will they be able to solve problems and learn at rates we could not because augmented reality makes information accessible at all times? Or . . . will the ethical dilemmas of this technology prevent its rise? What if someone were to hack these devices and literally lead children the wrong way home? What if this AR moves more towards twisting reality, allowing people to change the way the world looks to them and hence disconnecting them from the truth of their surroundings? There are many questions to be asked about augmented reality and much research to be done. This research could both solve and create many societal issues. AR has the potential to change the world, to change the way we learn, to change the way we communicate, to create a new reality. Now that you know of AR, what reality will you create?
Works Cited
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Frants, Daniil. "LTCCS: The Live-Time Closed Captioning System." Indiegogo. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 21.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ltccs-the-live-time-closed-captioning-system#/
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http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/04/12/uw-undergraduate-team-wins-10000-lemelson-mit-student-prize-for-gloves-that-translate-sign-language/
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