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Augmented Reality and Geography Fieldwork : Wikitude App

I enjoyed an Alpine start today thanks to my little boy. I found myself looking at this list of top 100 Apps thanks to Rich Allaway. One of the Apps featured was Wikitude. After exploring the Nearest Wiki App and it's possible uses in Geography fieldwork, I thought I'd have a play.

There is great potential for Geography Fieldwork by using this App.

The WIKITUDE World Browser presents the user with data about their surroundings, nearby landmarks, and other points of interest by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of a smart-phone. I used the iPhone version.


The first thing I did was to explore the view outside of my flat window. I found that there were more points of interest, mainly centered around commercial establishments. This was far more information than was provided by the Nearest Wiki App. The information accessed about the Toby Carvery was a review summary. This information could be useful when pre-visiting a fieldwork location, or looking for services in a particular settlement when looking at landuse.
The next job was to create some content. The sign up process is very easy: you can just use your Twitter account to log in. As the spire of St Mary's Church is clearly viable from the window, I set about creating a Point of Interest. (I'm also set to get married there in 2011!) Wikitude restricts the user to 250 characters. This would be great for getting pupils to develop their literacy skills by writing concisely, for example by avoiding Banned Words.
After creating my Point of Interest, I used the iPhone app to access the work. I was delighted to find that St Mary's Church now appeared in the augmented reality browser:

As Wikitude allows users to add URL's, I decided to link to a page of information. This was also available to view within the iPhone browser. There are plenty of gaps out there at the moment, Portsmouth for example, is relatively free of Points of Interest. This would make a great homework activity: young people could add their own Points of Interest

Finally, I had a go at linking to one of my 365 project posts:

This again was very easy to achieve. the image above was navigated to from within the Wikitude App.

I'll be having a bimble later, so will be seeing what else this App could do in the field.
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Comments

  1. John Sutton3 January 2010 at 11:18

    I haven't seen this app. Thanks for sharing. I'm sure that AR will be the next "Big thing". Do you know of any GPS enabled netbooks?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nick Dennis3 January 2010 at 11:33

    I've been meaning to explore how a way how technology could be used for History - really good examples about how it can be used for learning too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Richard Allaway3 January 2010 at 12:45

    The 'Nearest Wiki App' will only work on a 3GS where as Wikitude works on all iPhones - which is a bonus.

    ReplyDelete
  4. David Rogers3 January 2010 at 19:54

    John - I don;t know of any GPS enables netbooks, but a GPS facility would be very useful! The website that supports Wikitude uses your IP address to locate the computer. No good outdoors though!

    Chunks - many thanks

    Richard - great news!

    ReplyDelete
  5. SteveWiilliams4 January 2010 at 20:38

    There are a lot of standalone cameras hitting the shelves with GPS capabilities. The purpose of this is for geotagging. Geotagging is of course the ability to be able to save the location where the photo was taken so if you post it online it'll have the location data next to it.

    If you're interested in augmented reality on the iPhone, try out the application Layar. It's the same as Wikitude but provides different layers of information like layers in Photoshop, each of which can be turned on and off.

    I must agree with John in saying that AR is the next big thing. When cars have GPS built in mixing GPS with RFID would be awesome. If that were to happen, if you drive within a mile of your house the bath could automatically run etc.

    It's all very futuristic and is opening a whole load of possibility for everyone, humans and geography teachers alike ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. David Rogers4 January 2010 at 22:09

    Hi Steve,

    Thanks for the very useful comment. Do you have any examples of GPS enabled cameras?

    I'm very much looking forward to the AR developments.

    Plus I like th way you classify teachers as separate from humans! ;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. SteveWiilliams5 January 2010 at 10:22

    One of the best GPS-enabled cameras is the Nikon Coolpix P6000 with a sensor resolution of 13.5 megapixels.

    It's also got a 4x optical zoom and 2.7 inch non-touchscreen LCD display.

    http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-cameras/nikon-coolpix-p6000/4505-6501_7-33196876.html

    ReplyDelete

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