At this open event, you will receive the latest update on Augmented Reality education – that is learning the skills to develop AR applications. The event features renowned speakers who will share their experiences and perspectives on the topic of AR in educational study programs. The organizer of the event – Code Reality – will present the results of a three years-long project one the development of educational resources on the topic of AR.

The time is given in the Central European Time zone, Brussels time (UTC+1).

The Code Reality team will introduce the topic of the event – Augmented Reality Education – that is learning the skills for the development of Augmented Reality apps. The team will say a few words about the Code Reality community and the open educational resources we developed so far.

In his talk “Augmented Reality Education”, Mark Billinghurst will share his experience in AR education – that is – teaching how to develop AR. Mark has been teaching the topic of AR in multiple courses for over two decades. Mark is well known for sharing his teaching materials and inspiring AR enthusiasts. He is running numerous workshops and training events, often participating as a speaker at international events and an invited lecturer at universities around the world. These invaluable contributions to teaching AR complement his research work, which is highly appreciated in the community making Mark one of the most highly-cited researchers in the world.

The panel discussion brings together experts in teaching AR, leaders of study programs, instructors, researchers, and policy makers. The panelists have diverse experience in teaching the topic of AR in both traditional higher education study programs and online courses, developing commercial offers and open-source materials, organizing coding camps and summer schools.

The panelists will discuss how the demand for AR-skills is changing and how do you adapt the teaching, who wants to learn AR skills and if there is enough demand, what topics are central in AR curricula and how to find the right balance between theory and practice. The discussion will conclude by addressing the perspectives of higher education policies in AR and curricula recommendations.

The panel is extended by the Code Reality experts Fridolin Wild and Ralf Klamma.

The discussion is moderated by Mikhail Fominykh.

Augmented Reality is a rapidly growing field in ICT, drawing increasing numbers of professionals. Higher education institutions, however, are struggling to keep abreast of its development and to train specialists, providing few courses which sufficiently align with the industry needs. In addition to this, the field is developing so rapidly that existing courses struggle to keep pace. Also, the courses available often focus too narrowly on specifics to allow for the building of the formative foundations of AR education.

We address this need by proposing a blueprint curriculum in Computer Science Education for teaching AR in universities at two levels, foundations and advanced. We surveyed the state of the art, identifying common needs and problems in existing courses which focus on AR. We then detail a skills framework of 12 groups of skills suitable to meet industry needs, and, build upon it, two model lesson plans for a foundation and an advanced course. We conclude with a discussion of assessment techniques and curricular design options of embedding such coursework into existing academic programs and a forecast of the future of this academic field.

The AR Foundations course presents an introduction to AR, with emphasis on designing and developing AR apps. The course starts with a comprehensive introduction to the field, covering also its history. The course then introduces the state of the art of hardware and software, with practical try-out possibilities of Smart Glasses, interactive clothing, and other futuristic technology. The course covers all necessary material about Spatial Computing, HCI, Perception, Design Thinking, and Application Development. Insights into specialist application areas and job perspectives help sharpen the students’ skills set.

The AR Advanced course follows the software development cycle from inception, to implementation, to validation. It adds design thinking and UX guidelines, as well as advanced storytelling, teach creative tools and methods for outlining and substantiating the AR application idea. The implementation-focused technologies advance from the foundational course to cover spatial understanding (on top of spatial mapping), abstraction for cross-platform/multi-user/multi-device support, AI dialog understanding, openCV foundations, wearable technology and making things talk, and volumetric video capture. Finally, evaluating AR introduces the methodologies available for verifying and validating applications.

During this session, the floor will be open for questions from the participants. We would like to invite the participants to the Code Reality community where we share experience in teaching AR and work together on educational resources for teaching the topic.

The event is open for anyone interested in the topic of Augmented Reality, no matter if you are a software developer, a visual artist, a researcher, an industry worker or consultant, or a student of any study program.

The work on the Model Augmented Reality Curriculum has been completed in the framework of the WG 5: Developing a Model Augmented Reality Curriculum, organized by Code Reality at the ITiCSE 2020 conference.

The full results are reported in an article:

Mikhail Fominykh, Fridolin Wild, Ralf Klamma, Mark Billinghurst, Lisandra S. Costiner, Andrey Karsakov, Eleni Mangina, Judith Molka-Danielsen, Ian Pollock, Marius Preda, and Aljosa Smolic: “Model Augmented Reality Curriculum,” in the 25th annual conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2020), Trondheim, Norway (online), June 17–18, 2020, ACM (to appear).

The objectives and process are described in a short publication by the same authors: “Developing a Model Augmented Reality Curriculum,”DOI: 10.1145/3341525.3394991.