Starting Today: Foundations of Augmented Reality Open Online Course

Augmented reality describes the addition of a computer assisted contextual layer of information to the physical world, thereby creating an enhanced experience. Augmented reality used to require specialized equipment, none of which was widely accessible or easily portable. Today’s applications and mobile devices allow digital information to be overlaid anywhere, anytime, at low cost. This opens the door for creative educational scenarios.

Augmented books can help traversing a tricky textbook with detailed diagrams, enrich an art book, action into a comic book or even gaze into a tide pool. You can also use augmented reality to help readers explore wayfinding and meta data about books in a public library.

The open course ‘Foundations of Augmented Reality’ is open for enrollment starting today. As part of the course, students will be tasked with designing, developing, and evaluating their own Augmented Reality application. Starting February 10 the course runs for eight weeks until April 5 2020.

The course covers the development process from conceptual design over implementation to evaluation. It covers topics such as design thinking, user experience and story-telling, Unity 3D, artificial intelligence dialogues, wearable technology, history of AR and psychology of perception.

The course ia available on the Code Reality’s online platform Code Reality: Learn. A free account is required to access the activities and materials of the course. The course is open for anyone to join, but the organizers recommend the following prerequisites:

• some basic mathematical and programming skills (Python, Java, C or C++, Unity programming or equivalent)
• fundamentals of algorithms and data structures
• linear algebra, especially with respect to 3D transformations
• some basic 3D computer graphics
• fundamentals of media, communications or marketing

The Code Reality platform is offered through the EU-funded project ‘Augmented Reality in Formal European University Education (AR-FOR-EU)’. In addition to the open course format, the team also works on an open textbook ‘The Open Augmented Reality Teaching Book’, an open educational resource with a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.