Creating Augmented Reality in Education

Audience shot. Thanks for being a super bunch.

I was up bright and early today. Well, early anyway. The taxi was picking me up at 5:45 to get me to the station for a train ride to London. I was giving a session at the “Creating Augmented Reality in Education” event. By 5:55 the taxi had still not turned up and a panic phone call to the company revealed that the driver was out there in the mist looking for my house. So, I told him where we could meet up and then, pausing only to step in a deep puddle, fill my shoes with muddy water and say a rude word loudly for the whole of the street to wake up to, I headed for the cab.

We made it to the train with minutes to spare and I got there just in time for the first session. There was a great range of stuff, from descriptions of work in Health Training to eye popping demos of flying dragons and Mars Rovers to thought provoking discussion of just how this stuff is going to change the way we interact with computers and also the world around us. The consensus would seem to be that the stuff is coming, it will change our lives, but we don’t quite know how yet. Perhaps our kids will tell us. The sessions were videoed and should be available at some point. Well worth a look.

I did a session on how the Kinect sensor works, and how the data it produces can be used to get interesting behaviours and applications. My finest moment was asking the chap at the back why he was waving a piece of card with the number “3” printed on it. “Because you have 3 minutes left” was the rather sensible reply.

Anyhoo, all the demos worked, and my shoes and socks dried up fine. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here. You can find a more detailed presentation with code descriptions, along with the demo code, here.