Competency: Development
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Virtual Campus Tour
Summary: I worked as part of team of eight graduate students, post docs and a professor in the SISLT program to develop a location based augmented reality campus tour. This tour required students to visit locations on campus, but used their geographical proximity to features to enable additional content on a handheld tablet.
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Process: Our team brainstormed ideas about interesting places on campus and what features to tell students. In addition, we came up with a game aspect of visiting locations and completing activities to find Truman the Tiger and get a reward. We started with a pilot of two locations and decided that the ARIS software would be feasible to use. We then had a workshop in which students learned how to use ARIS software to create a scene for each campus location we wanted to feature. We met several times to work on the scenes and the piece that tied all the scenes together. The team tested with several users and then the tour was implemented with international visiting high school students.
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My Role: I served as the technical lead for the project. I taught myself the basics of the ARIS system and worked with another student to create the proof of concept prototype for the tour. I also conducted a workshop for fellow teammates to help them learn the ARIS system and create scenes for their locations. The project lead and I worked together to create background logic in ARIS to tie the various campus locations together. I also performed a walk-through of the system and noted any users experience irregularities.
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Reflection: The project was on and off again several times which hindered the development process. We did not get to gather much user feedback to make changes to the tour before it was implemented. One thing we noticed which was also an issue in a different PBL project I did was problems with multiple users sharing a single device. The users did not naturally share the device well and this resulted in low engagement. In future application development, I would be sure to recommend no more than two users per device and to build in sharing of the device. This was also an interesting experience developing with a large group of users, many of whom were not very technical. Well defined roles and responsibilities, a person in charge of overall theme, milestones, and additional testing time will be included in all future development projects.
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Artifact: This editor screenshot shows the 9 different scenes developed for the ARIS campus tour. Within each scene are multiple conversations and items that are logically connected with triggers. In addition, I was the lead author of a poster that was accepted at the Games, Learning and Society 2017 conference. "Beyond the Campus Walking Tour: An ARIS Augmented Learning Expedition"
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