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AR Scratch, the first augmented-reality (AR) authoring environment designed for children.

this environment allows pre-teens to create programs that mix real and virtual spaces. Children can display virtual objects on a real-world space seen through a camera, and they can control the virtual world through interactions between physical objects.

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or an indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics.

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or an indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real-world with a simulated one.

AR has become common in sports telecasting. The yellow "first down" line seen in television broadcasts of American football games shows the line the offensive team must cross to receive a first down using the 1st & Ten system. The real-world elements are the football field and players, and the virtual element is the yellow line, which augment the image in real time. Similarly, in ice hockey an AR colored trail shows location and direction of the puck. Sections of Rugby fields and cricket pitches display sponsored images.

The basic idea is to immerse a user inside an imaginary, computer-generated "virtual world." Although many different technologies can be used to achieve this effect, they all share a common result: the user is cut off from any view of the real world outside. Much less attention has been paid to the field of Augmented Reality, although its potential is at least as great as that of Virtual Environments. In Augmented Reality, the user can see the real world around him, with computer graphics superimposed or composited with the real world. Instead of replacing the real world, we supplement it. Ideally, it would seem to the user that the real and virtual objects coexisted.

Augmented Reality is important in education for a number of reasons: The real world can be annotated. Location information can be available in places or on objects Users can interact with virtual and physical objects at the same time. User can see virtual model from all angles. User can experiment/practice with virtual objects in a realistic but no consequence situation. (For example, practice surgery, firefighting) Engagement- rich information engages user -appeals to different learning styles

The Wrap™ 920AR augmented reality eyewear and maxReality™ plug-in for Autodesk® 3ds Max® empower you to turn your desktop into a “HOLO-Deck”. maxReality provides the power to easily bring Autodesk® 3ds Max® characters to life on your desktop, displayed in stereoscopic 3D through the Wrap 920AR augmented reality eyewear. For those familiar with the basic operation of Autodesk 3ds Max it takes only minutes until you are able to view in an augmented reality application using the maxReality Viewer and provided marker. Never has augmented reality been so fast and easy. A wearable display with a 67-inch screen, as viewed from ten feet, stereo video capture, 6-degrees of freedom head tracking, VGA connectivity for your computer and plug-in software to bring your Autodesk® 3ds Max® characters to life – this bundle has it all.

Augmented reality or AR is a mixture of the real-world and virtual computer-generated imagery or information. With the Wrap 920AR, the real world is captured by it’s stereo camera system and displayed in the eyewear on what appears to your eyes as a 67-inch display as seen from 10-feet (3m). This image, which can be displayed in standard 2D or 3D, can be augmented with virtually any form of computer-generated data in the form of text, still images or even video. Until now, augmented reality has been limited to bulky stationary displays or portable hand-held systems with limited capabilities. Although these solutions implemented AR technology, it was in an unnatural format with obvious technology barriers. The Wrap 920AR is the first consumer product that empowers users to experience AR in a real-world environment – worn like sunglasses and displaying 3D graphics. Developer Support Vuzix provides an evolving SDK (Software Development Kit) and additional resources designed to aid and assist developers in the implementation of support for Vuzix products in virtual and augmented reality applications. Go to the Developer Support for additional information and links to downloadable developer resources.

Research into games for educational purposes reveals some interesting trends. Early studies of consumer games helped to identify the aspects of games that make them especially engaging and appealing to players of various ages and of both genders: the feeling of working toward a goal; the possibility of attaining spectacular successes; the ability to problem-solve, collaborate with others, and socialize; an interesting story line; and other characteristics. These qualities are replicable, though they can be difficult to design well, and they can transfer to games featuring educational content.

Back in the 19th century English author, Martin Tupper wrote: "A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever." It's true: books are friendly, familiar, and loveable and that probably explains why it's taking us so long to get used to the idea of portable electronic books. But with the arrival of a new generation of electronic book readers, such as the Sony Reader, and Amazon Kindle, the days of the printed word just might be numbered. Let's take a closer look at electronic books (e-books) and find out how they work! Photo: Left: Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. Photo by courtesy of John Blyberg, published on Flickr under a Creative Commons License. Right: The rival Sony Reader PRS-350 is considerably smaller, partly because its touch-sensitive screen does away with the need for a keyboard.

contain Think of a book and you think of a single object, but the books we read are actually two things in one: there's the information (the words and pictures and their meaning) and there's the physical object (the paper, cardboard, and ink) that contains them. Sometimes the physical part of a book is as important as the information it carries: it's really true that we judge books by their covers—at least when we're standing in shops deciding which ones to buy—and that's why publishers devote so much attention to making their books look attractive. But, a lot of the time, the information is much more important to us and we don't really care how it's delivered. That's why many of us now turn to the Web when we want to find things out instead of visiting the local library. In short, we've learned to split off the information we need from the way it's delivered. E-books take this idea a step further. When we talk about an e-book, we really mean a digital version of a printed text that we can read on a handheld electronic device like a miniature laptop computer— two quite separate things, once again.

How do you store a book in electronic form? An e-book is really just a computer file full of words (and sometimes images). In theory, you could make an e-book just by typing information into a word processor. The file you save has all the elements of an electronic book: you can read the information on a computer, search it for keywords, or share it easily with someone else. The first attempt to create a worldwide library of e-books was called Project Gutenberg and it's still running today. Long before the World Wide Web came along, a bunch of dedicated Gutenberg volunteers took printed books and scanned or typed them into their computers to make electronic files they could share. For legal reasons, these books were (and still are) mostly classic old volumes that had fallen out of copyright. The electronic versions of these printed books are very basic, text-only computer files stored in a format called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)—a way of representing letters, numbers, and symbols with the numbers 0-255 that virtually every computer can understand. Photo: The Amazon Kindle electronic book reader (left) alongside a rival, the Sony eReader (right). Photo by courtesy of John Blyberg, published on Flickr under a Creative Commons License. Note the picture displayed on the Kindle screen: E Ink screens can show pictures, though so far only in very unimpressive black and white. The problem with ASCII is that the text contains very little formatting information: you can't distinguish headings from text, there's only one basic font, and there's no bold or italics. That's why people developed much more sophisticated electronic files like PDF (Portable Document Format). The basic idea of PDF was to store an almost exact replica of a printed document in an electronic file that people could easily read on screens or print out, if they preferred. The HTML files people use to create web pages are another kind of electronic information. Every HTML page on a website is a bit like a separate page in a book, but the links on web pages mean you can easily hop around until you find exactly the information you want. The links on websites give you powerfully interconnected information that is often much quicker to use than a library of printed books. The greatest strength of ASCII, PDF, and HTML files (you can read them on any computer) is also their greatest weakness: who wants to sit staring at a computer screen, reading thousands of words? Most screens are much less sharp than the type in a printed book and it quickly tires your eyes reading in this way. Even if you can store lots of books on your computer, you can't really take it to bed with you or read it on the beach or in the bath-tub! Now, there's nothing to stop you downloading simple text files onto something like an iPod or a cellphone and reading them, very slowly and painfully, from the small LCD display—but it's not most people's idea of curling up with a good book. What we really need is something with the power of a computer, the portability of a cellphone, and the friendliness and readability of a printed book. And that's exactly where electronic book readers come in.

The story-based, participatory AR games developed by the ROAR team are played on Apple iPhones and Android-based smartphones and use GPS technology to correlate the students’ real world location to their virtual location in the game’s digital world. As the students walk and run around their school grounds, a map on their handheld displays virtual objects and characters (fig. 1 and 2) who exist in an AR layer superimposed on real space. When students come within approximately 30 feet of these digital artifacts, the AR and GPS software trigger video, audio, and text files, which provide academic and problem solving challenges as well as narrative, navigation, and collaboration cues. Figure 1: Live-view of digital objects on school grounds Figure 2: Map-view of player’s position and digital objects on school grounds

The Virtual Forensics laboratory is designed to teach applied forensic science through game-based learning.

We are creating a new kind of reality, one in which physical and digital environments, media, and interactions are woven together throughout our daily lives. In this world, the virtual and the physical are seamlessly integrated. Cyberspace is not a destination; rather, it is a layer tightly integrated into the world around us. Technology enables this transformation but, as is always the case, when we invent new technologies, they in turn re-invent us. In the realm of blended reality, the technologies and tools that we are creating change a fundamental part of our existence: the lenses through which we view and interact with the world. We are literally beginning to see and feel the world through a new set of eyes and ears—things that were previously invisible become visible, and we see the familiar in a new way. Almost ten years ago, we wrote about the sensory transformation we’re about to undergo as technologies move off the desktop and into the physical environment. We also pointed out that sensory transformations inevitably lead to major social and cultural transformations because they shape the nature of what we experience and how we make sense of our surroundings [Cybernomads SR-829]. Blended reality is the manifestation of these changes. It is a type of sensory transformation that will change people’s lives, their senses of selves and others, and their views of the world around them. In this report we analyze key directions of this metamorphosis.

n 1990, Boeing researcher Tom Caudell first coined the term “augmented reality” to describe a digital display used by aircraft electricians that blended virtual graphics onto a physical reality. As for the computer science world’s definition of augmented reality (AR) though, it’s more detailed, but essentially the same: Augmented reality is the interaction of superimposed graphics, audio and other sense enhancements over a real-world environment that’s displayed in real-time.AR is not a new concept either. In fact, we’ve seen it in many different ways over the years, but we just might not have noticed. From the yellow first-down lines sketched over a televised football game to the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit—or even examples as basic as where a projector’s been used to project images atop a real setting—all are examples of virtual graphics being superimposed upon a real-life situation.

Linked to the general principles of how we learn are more specific principles that describe how we learn in the context of effective game environments. James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy , describes 36 learning principles that well-designed games embody. Following are four: Subset Principle: Learning, even at its start, takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain. For example, the setting for the loading dock game should represent an actual loading dock, so that players can easily map their in-game behavior to on-the-job performance. However, it must be a simplified version that omits unimportant details, so that players can focus on aspects of the simulation that are relevant to the learning objective—things like crosswalks and pedestrians. Active, Critical Learning Principle: The learning environment must encourage active and critical, not passive, learning. In the loading dock example, this means players do not merely watch correct and incorrect examples of loading dock behavior, followed by a quiz—they actually think, act, experience consequences and pursue goals in a variable game environment. Probing Principle: Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; re-probing the world to test the hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis. For example, an effective loading dock game must present a functional environment in which players may choose from and evaluate many different actions. The goal is to find the right course of action via experimentation—making choices and experiencing the consequences. Practice Principle: Learners get lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). For example, to encourage practice—and thus, development of good habits—the loading dock game must gradually increase the difficulty level of the in-game challenges. This keeps players engaged and encourages them to continually hone their skills.

As noted elsewhere, the Poitin Press is a virtual publishing house in that it sells its books over the Internet both as printed and eBooks. Our reasons for us doing so are explained in "About Us". In this section we would like to briefly explain the current state of eBooks, what your options are, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each. The intent is to help you make your choice of which is for you.

Presently, there are several different formats of eBooks.  They fall into two basic categories: Those that run on a computer such as a workstation or laptop, and those that require a special device, often called an "eBook" but are really a special-purpose computer in their own right.  A third category based on PDAs and similar hand-held devices is also available. 

One interesting factoid is that while the popularity of workstations is dropping, they are not being replaced by "Internet appliances" as touted in the last few years, or even PDAs, or the new "Tablets." By far and away, the choice is still the combination of laptops and PDAs, which are generally used in combination by today's cyber road-warriors. The PDA is used during meetings and such and then downloaded into the laptop so that the information can be gathered into spreadsheets, reports, and presentations.  This makes the laptop the hardware of choice for the eBook marketers because the target customer is likely to already have one, and so does not have to buy, support and cart around yet another bit of hardware. For this reason, we have chosen to support only those eBook formats that can run on a laptop. There are three such formats: Palm eBook, Microsoft's Reader, and Adobe's Acrobat eBook Reader.  They are not compatible with each other. They have fundamentally different technology in each and one cannot display the other's format.

5G Mobile Phones Will Change Our World 5G mobile phones represent a considerable improvements to the already eye opening Apple iPhone or Google Android units, which are just unveiling their own considerable opportunities. It seems that the status quo is only being established but as this kind of technology never hangs around for any period of time the so-called “5G” is likely to vanquish 3G really quickly. The 5G communication system will be based around extensive use of voice over Internet protocol, also known as VoIP. Data will be transferred at very high speeds and call quality will take a considerable step forward. How long do you think it will be before our once humble cell phone is promoted to the rank of virtual personal assistant? Whereas it was once just a talking device, an amazing number of features and flexibility will likely give us a huge number of choices to help us lead our daily lives. The cutting-edge equipment will surely make the best use of these new delivery methods.

Augmented reality, a capability that has been around for decades, is shifting from what was once seen as a gimmick to a bonafide game-changer.

Various forms of augmented reality, starting with early head-mounted displays, have been around for more than 30 years. Over that time, increased bandwidth and smart phone adoption, as well as a proliferation of AR browser applications, have helped AR evolve from a family of cool gadgets on the periphery of graphics and visualization technologies to an increasingly central player in the technology landscape.

Augmented reality (AR) refers to the addition of a computer-assisted contextual layer of information over the real world, creating a reality that is enhanced or augmented.

nspired by early work in virtual reality, Robert sought to bring 3-D gestural interfaces to the masses.

advertising and games on interactive floors, walls, tables, windows, counters and bar tops. Our immersive advertising technology creates interactive digital signs that project people’s video image onscreen for an

he interactive installation “mæve” (MACE-Everyville) provides visual and tangible access to the social and intellectual networks behind architectural projects

1. Ascolta - Ping the Router. A web-based game for learning computer network engineering skills. 2. think3 - Time Mechanic. The company's second, web-based, game for learning to use their CAD software 3. Imparta - Sales Co-Pilot. The company's sequel to Strategy Co-Pilot 4.Learnetix - Zwolf. A game for technical learning. In German. 5. Institute for Creative Technologies, USC (ICT) - Full Spectrum Command - A company-level training game for Army Captains 6. Institute for Creative Technologies, USC (ICT) - Full Spectrum Warrior - A Squad-level Training Game for the Army. On X-Box. 7. MIT - Supercharged! - A game for understanding counter-intuitive physics concepts 8. MIT - Environmental Detective - A game for determining the source of a water contamination problem. On Pocket PC 9. Carnegie Mellon - BioHazard - a game about dealing with a bioterror attack. 10. Will Interactive - Think Like a Commander - Army training game. 11. MAK - Marine Air-Ground Task Force -MAGTF XXI - Marines training game 12 MAK - Battle Command 2010-BC2010 -Army training game 13. SimuLearm - Virtual Leader - A game about driving one's agenda through a variety of meetings at different levels