I. Overview
This project was my thesis for my MSA at Parsons. I wanted to work on a problem solving project.
In order to create awareness on the history of Lebanon, I combined augmented reality and social photographs to create an instructional design app.
Augmented reality is one of the best instructional design techniques. Learning by observing creates a cognitive reasoning in the user and facilitates the perception of the knowledge through diverse angles. The purpose of TOURATH is to create the first and crucial step in the long awaited mission that aims at understanding the history of Lebanon without political events.
II. Process
According to a survey done on seven Lebanese citizens between the age of 20 and 27 I have organised, none of the participants have the same perception of the history or the right facts of events that existed and were celebrated within the Lebanese culture.
The survey was a series of questions focusing on the knowledge of the history and culture. Most of the candidates learned what they know from stories that have been passed on by their parents or grand parents. The study of the Lebanese culture is only found in commercial books written by the memories or imagination of authors.
The project TOURATH is proposed in the form of a smartphone application. I decided to use this medium because it is one of the best ways to reach out to young generations considering four over five people own smartphones. Additionally, it is a way to experience reality through virtually by overlaying an image on the screen using the camera input of the smartphone or tablet.
The application TOURATH uses the geolocation of the user to determine interesting areas nearby. The technological role of the augmented reality provides the user with information that is complementary to the physical space the user is in and therefore creates an augmented reality experience.
It is an interesting way to connect information to the user in an environment where the knowledgeable data is no longer present. To fill the knowledge gap, the interactive application TOURATH allows the users to look at interesting areas while overlaying information within the real physical space the user is in.
To create this augmented reality application, I had to define first the places or landmarks that are going to be interesting to point out as a cultural reference to the young generation, I therefore used these spaces as points of interests defined in google API nearby the geo-location of the user that are represented using Map Kit, positioned in the camera view through the ARtoolKit set.
The application alerts the user at the beginning of the process through a pop up to allow the location to be enabled in order to track the user’s current location and therefore unravel the nearby places. The functionality of the location is set to updates the area of the user the first time then stops the update location process in order to save battery life.
The POI (points of interests) are situated on a x and y order of a Cartesian coordinate system. With the use of an API system, the creation of several locations within the string is accessible. The use of AR Toolkit created the overlay on the POI and their positioning as well as activates the camera in the device to a live direct feedback.
