[djgagnon]

I'm pretty excited to announce that the AR update to ARIS went live to the App Store earlier this week along with a new release of the editor.

See https://fielddaylab.wisc.edu/courses/aris-ar for a description of how to use these new features.

A big thank you to the Minnesota Historical Society for contributing these new features!

David

[chrish]

I've been using AR view this spring and having a bunch of fun. I made a game in a library that has 3 views, and the tech works pretty solidly. It's a bit of a pain to get set up at viewforia, but once in, it's easy. There are a couple rough edges, like you better not rename the zip file you download, but it's neat.

I also wrote a blog post this spring about responsible use of this or any AR. Try not to be boring there!

[cleffingwell]

I have struggled a bit with the technological label of AR being associated with our project and viewing the project as falling short because we really do not incorporate the typical AR gadgetry trick that you were describing in your post. We were instead doing more simple scanning of QR codes located in the room scene or other trigger types to tell more about what is happening in the room or a video of the patient telling us their story. We will try to incorporate the new AR functionality if we have time to write to it in and create appropriate media, but now I feel a bit better about what we have already done to enhance the student experience and still being able to refere to it as a type of AR.

So, I think I realize now the what we are doing while not being exactly technically using what some people refer to as AR, that we in fact are using ARIS and the iPad to tell more about the patients story and lifting the health care student's experience to be as real as we can make it given the tools we have.

[chrish]

It's funny the label AR. It seems to me that what people usually call AR ends up lacking depth once you get past a tech demo. I think Pokemon Go is a good example. Most of the game works with GPS. It's just the little moments where you capture the monsters where there is "AR". And this can be and usually is turned off by players. Bogost for instance uses this as a reason to call PG an alternate reality game instead of AR. I'd rather have AR encompass more than a single mechanic. I can't think of any standalone through the lens (TTL) experiences that feel like more than gimmicks without something else there to hold it all together. We've been doing AR since before the visual tricks existed in accessible places (mostly jet fighter helmets back in the day), and there will be even more mechanics for layering realities soon. Of course I see possibilities for TTL, and conversations can be confusing when so many people think of TTL as the limit of AR, so I can sympathize with your plight and I'm glad to see this mechanic come to ARIS. But I'm also glad to have so much else to use it alongside so that what we can make, like your team's fantastic work Charles, can have some real depth to it, not just a moment of eye candy.

Then again, I tend to like anachronistic things and get cranky about this sort of thing. No doubt YMMV.

[chrish]

I've got the beginnings of a written tutorial for using AR views in ARIS in the manual.



It's at the bottom of the page. No images yet and steps are rough. It should compliment Dave's videos, which are very visual, for now. I hope to complete soon.

[rfletcher]

Has this feature now been eliminated, since Vuforia has changed its business model? Are there any plans to integrate a different image-based AR feature, perhaps open-source to avoid such problems in the future?

Thanks!