Helen Farley

Helen Farley is a Senior Lecturer (Digital Futures) at the Australian Digital Futures Institute at the University of Southern Queensland. She is currently leading the USQ-led Collaborative Research Network (CRN) project with ANU and UniSA to develop a Mobile Learning Evaluation Framework. She is also the project lead of the OLT-funded from ‘Access to Success’ project which will develop Stand Alone Moodle that will enable electronic access to course materials and activities for those students without internet access. Helen has many years’ experience as an educator in Higher Education and as a researcher of educational technology. Her research interests are focused around the use of mobile technologies and virtual worlds in Higher Education. Visit her webpage at: http://www.usq.edu.au/adfi/team/helen

Presentation Title:

The Future for Virtual Worlds: Mobile Technologies and Augmented Reality

Synopsis:

Virtual worlds have failed to live up to the expectations of educators and trainers alike. They are difficult to use, require lots of bandwidth and are often unstable. This presentation will speculate about the future of virtual worlds on mobile devices through envisaging them transformed as multi-user augmented reality.

Location-based mobile learning is a way of integrating storytelling and augmented reality with location-interaction on a mobile device. It is learning in an authentic context, outside of the classroom using all the interactive possibilities of mobile devices. The display of virtual information upon the physical world is a fundamental property of AR interfaces.

Compared to virtual reality (VR), AR creates opportunities for enhancing real world objects and environments instead of replacing them. The realization of worth of mobile AR largely depends on maximizing the relevance of virtual overlays with regard to the physical world. This presentation will investigate the possibilities afforded by mobile technologies, virtual worlds and augmented reality for education using a series of educational scenarios.

This session will allow educators and trainers to re-envisage virtual worlds as multi-user augmented reality with all the benefits that technology affords.