Saturday, July 23, 2011

Augmented Reality Apps and Visual Literacy

Augmented reality has been a fascination with me for the last couple of years.  In fact, when I purchased my Nexus One almost two years ago, one of the apps preloaded on it was Google Goggles, Google's augmented reality app for visual searching and location-based searching.  It was a little disappointing using this app at first, it was not simple to use and provided too many visual search results to be usable, it was really just a toy at the time.  But now I am gearing up for the final project for our EPSY 590ML course and our team is focusing on augmented reality for educational purposes.  Looking at other augmented reality tools for reference such as: Layar, Yelp, Wikitude, these types of applications create a new way to search which is really interesting.  Google just purchased a company called PittPatt which specializes in object recognition software; it will be interesting to find out how Google plans to incorporate such a technology into its Web 2.0 platforms.  One of my classmates in the GSE program in cohort 8, focused on visual literacy for his final project in our capstone course and I had never heard these two terms used together, but I found the concept very important.  As the proliferation of mobile devices continue and as mobile devices can interpret and recognize images more easily, visual literacy is going to be an important skill for all people.    

Here is an interesting Ted Talk about Visual Literacy by Brian Kennedy, the director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College:



As technologies such as augmented reality move from early adopter or innovator status to becoming a more mainstream and widely adopted technology, should curricula be updated to incorporate visual literacy?  Kennedy states that 90% of our meaning comes through visuals, so as he argues, I think it will be critical for visual literacy to be a consideration in an curriculum review and ultimately added to curricula. 

One question I have is: will our devices become more visually literate than we are, at least in terms of interpreting or reading visual images?  If our devices can begin constructing meaning from what they read, then it is possible that they may become more literate.  We, humans may have some catching up to do with our devices.  

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