Application of sensors in Augmented Reality based interactive learning environments

Context awareness, user friendliness, and interactivity are very important and powerful concepts in building useful teaching/learning environments for the benefit of mankind. Advancements in technology are enabling us to look at new use cases in the methods of teaching, information sharing, knowledge dissemination, and self-learning. Learning environments are not only for teaching things to people., but also for providing more information to them on any subject that they may require from time to time. User friendliness can be enhanced with clever use of sensors to give hands free interactivity with the devices/gadgets. Context aware applications require sensors to get the context information. Mobile devices like smart phones and tablets today come with a hand full of sensors mounted on them which include one or two cameras, a microphone, a touch screen, an accelerometer to sense motion, and in addition have GPS and digital compass to provide location information to applications requiring these sensory inputs. The computational power packed in the processors used in these devices/gadgets including special support for graphics processing, the near general purpose computer like operating system environments, and the quality of cameras available, are all enabling application developers to map some serious computer vision based applications on today's mobile devices. This reality has encouraged us to get into development of Augmented Reality (AR) based interactive learning environments on mobile devices, leading to our development of a software framework for AR applications development and also development of an AR book and an AR board. AR has been called the eighth mass medium, after print, recordings, cinema, radio, television, Internet and mobile phones. There is ample scope for enhancing the learning/teaching experiences of the users with AR based learning environments. AR makes learning more effective and an enjoyable experience by providing more realistic information with the use of 3D graphics and animated models.