PERSPECTIVES ON IMPLEMENTING INTERACTIVE ELEARNING TOOLS USING AUGMENTED REALITY IN EDUCATION

The current rapid advancements in wearable devices hardware and software technologies offer both new opportunities for education, but can also come with challenges for the education providers. Current selling trends among the wearable gadgets indicate a rapid growth in user demand, especially among teenagers and students. The increasing availability of display technologies like OLED and Quantum Dot technologies is opening the doors for the development of new flexible devices, adapting normal surfaces for user interfaces and offering new possibilities of interactivity. The devices' miniaturization, along with the increase of processing power and video cameras performance, can be used as new tools in education, that can add dynamic virtual generated content to information from the real world and provide knowledge on-demand to mobile users. One efficient way to implement such a tool is by using Augmented Reality (AR) software with mobile devices, such as tablets, smartphones of phablets. In this paper, a series of tools are presented, that can be used by teachers and trainers to add 3D generated content by mapping it to objects from the real world, using software tools to process the visual information received from a video camera, analyse the visual content, dynamically add the 3D content depending on the parameters of the real world "markers" and to display the results on the mobile device's screen. The development workflow is also presented, describing the work process from creating a marker to publishing the result as a standalone application that can be installed on an device running Android operating system. The demo application implements these technologies to demonstrate the presented concepts and to provide an example of enhancing a course material in wind energy field by implementing AR to increase the interactivity with the students, increase the self-learning experience and stimulate the students' curiosity and understanding of the technical studied aspects.