OK. Let me first say that, in the immortal words of Gil Scott-Heron, the revolution will not be televised. It's going to be online, of course. (I couldn't resist.)
Let me also say that I love AR. In some ways I love it more than the possibilities of VR because it gets anchored into our world as we interact with in. A few years back I tweeted about my excitement for Google Expeditions, the now-defunct product that let teachers take students on virtual field trips using mobile devices and Google Cardboard VR goggles. I am sad that I never got around to using it with my own students before Google decided to shutter its doors.
I got so excited that I made a video to advertise it for all of the teachers in SD61. Here's my tweet from a few years back:
When I decided to make another screencap video like this one, I was happy to see that many of the exciting AR features were being migrated over to Google Arts and Culture, a free app that lets you explore the museums of the world virtually with high-res photographs of many of the exhibitions. And AR is still alive and well, I'm happy to report. Just check out what I was able to adorn the walls of my house with here (apologies for the vertical video - the iPad demanded it:
As you can see, this is rather different than strapping VR goggles on your face and disconnecting from the outside world. AR asks us to imagine grounded possibilities in the world we inhabit with limitless imaginative possibilities.
I'm really excited to see the world of AR painting take over. There have been so many amazing versions of this trend happening online and it would be a remarkable way to see what the cyberartists of this century are going to come up with when they aren't limited by materials or even scale!
In the library learning commons, AR offers a potential for democratization of access to artwork and other artifacts usually kept far away or locked behind glass. And with students working on inquiry projects, the building of original AR artifacts offers a world of possibilities for communicating their creativity and learning. I'm so excited to see where it ends up.
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