Augmented Reality (AR) technology creates interactive, immersive, experiential experiences where our real, physical world is digitally augmented. The most popular application for AR in education is the use of AR mobile applications in the classroom, or outside the classroom which can help to provide a visual representation and audio explanation of a subject.
In the case of AR apps, the only technology required is a mobile phone making AR technology rather accessible. Augmented Reality learning technology allows educators to incorporate personalized, game-based learning that improves engagement as well as perception.
Augmented Reality, one of the technology trends in higher education, has a tremendous capacity for simulations and training in areas such as medicine, engineering, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and veterinary medicine but also in areas such as history.
Kinfolk Technology, a non-profit digital and educational platform, uses art and emerging technologies such as AR as a tool to re-center the stories, lives, and achievements of overlooked and marginalized African-American people as well as people of other ethnicities. Kinfolk partnered with Columbia University and Stanford University and received a grant from them through their Brown Institute for Media Innovation Initiatives to create an AR application that would bring Black history figures to life. Kinfolk has partnered with Wake Forest University for research and monument creation.
The AR application provides digital experiences that can be used to enhance educational or cultural events, guided historical tours, interactive learning, used to create custom experiences or to incorporate an interactive and engaging special module in an American Black history course as part of a 21st century curriculum. The company, based in New York, collaborates with historians, educators, and genealogical experts to bring vivid living history in the form of an immersive AR experience.
The Kinfolk History AR app brings newly imagined monuments to life, featuring underrepresented Black historical figures through the application’s AR archive. In partnership with Netflix, KinfolkCC created four monuments part of Netflix’s Amend: The Fight for America (free to watch on YouTube).
The platform, co-founded by Idris Brewster (formerly at Google) debuted the Monuments Project through Kinfolk, inserting digital monuments into public spaces, museums, classrooms, and even livingrooms. The first AR statue is of the 18th century Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, placed in Columbus Circle, a heavily trafficked intersection in the New York City borough of Manhattan.
Recently, Kinfolk’s AR historical statues were included in New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) new exhibition series: Architecture Now: New York, New Publics. This is the first ever Augmented Reality installation exhibited at the MoMA and certainly one of highly educational value. The exhibition, which showcases 12 projects for public-facing spaces across New York City’s five boroughs, will be open until July 29.
For more articles on Augmented Reality, see:
Classroom 3.0: Instructors Using Augmented Reality, Holograms