Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Augmented Reality Glasses Coming Soon???

Although much of my time these days is either spent planning and preparing for our district to go fully 1:1 next school year when we issue Google Chromebooks to almost all of our students or coaching my seven year old son's two different soccer teams, I do try to keep an eye on the future.  At the rapid pace that technology is evolving, it's almost impossible to keep up and yet I feel it's my job to make sure my district is prepared for, well, who knows what.  The who-knows-what that I've been most interested in are the developments being made with augmented reality.  Wikipedia defines augmented reality as being the "live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data."  There are already a number of products on the market that utilize augmented reality and I truly believe that they could become the next major transformative tools in education.  So I found it both funny and ironic today that, during a presentation to our faculty, our Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction (@LeydenASCI) used a video clip from Back to the Future showing Marty McFly on a hover board and suggested that that this type of future may not be all that far away and then soon after the presentation learned that Google announced that they have begun testing their new augmented reality glasses.  I quickly remembered an inspiring video I came across a few years ago from a graduate student titled Augmented Reality - The Future of Education and am excited to see how his vision is now close to becoming a reality.  Thanks Google!

One students dream back in 2009...

is getting closer to becoming a reality today thanks to Project Glass.




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