The Hololens Is Here...

Your friendly EdTech department recently acquired a Microsoft Hololens virtual reality device. Basically, it's a Windows 10 computer that you wear on your head and use to interact with the real world.

Microsoft adds, "Windows 10 is the first platform to support holographic computing with APIs that enable gaze, gesture, voice, and environmental understanding on a self-contained device. With Windows 10, holograms are Universal Windows platform apps, and all Universal Windows apps can be made to work as holograms. Holograms in Windows 10 will lead to entirely new ways for us to communicate, create, and explore."

Liz Young enters augmented reality

We are interested in how this technology could be integrated into the educational realm.  As such, we will be actively seeking interested faculty and student partners to help develop applications for use at LC.  Some ideas we've had include virtual tours, virtual 3D modeling, and smart-classroom interactivity.  

If you are a student and are interested in earning a paycheck by developing for the Hololens, please contact Educational Technology at edtech@lclark.edu. 

Augmented Reality

     Fascinating The Atlantic article about the exciting/scary/awesome future of Augmented Reality which just happens to be one of the topics we will be discussing during the Innovative Speed Dating session on May, 21st Thursday at the Faculty Technology Institute. http://www.lclark.edu/live/events/37956-innovative-technology-speed-dating

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The World Is Not Enough: Google and the Future of Augmented Reality

 

The new Google FieldTrip app probes the question: What digital information do you want to see overlaid on the physical world?

It is The Future. You wake up at dawn and fumble on the bedstand for your (Google) Glass. Peering out at the world through transparent screens, what do you see? 
If you pick up a book, do you see a biography of its author, an analysis of the chemical composition of its paper, or the share price for its publisher? Do you see a list of your friends who've read it or a selection of its best passages or a map of its locations or its resale price or nothing? The problem for Google's brains, as it is for all brains, is choosing where to focus attention and computational power. As a Google-structured augmented reality comes closer to becoming a product-service combination you can buy, the particulars of how it will actually merge the offline and online are starting to matter...

More at link:
 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-world-is-not-enough-google-and-the-future-of-augmented-reality/264059/