3 Things I Learned about the Aurasma Augmented Reality App at the Evening of the Arts

Two weeks ago, my school hosted its annual Frisch Evening of the Arts. This program displays the fruit of student’s hard work and creative talents in music and visual arts. You can view pictures from the event below.

Showcasing the student's creative process.

One of the challenges of such an event is that it inevitably emphasizes the finished product, the student artwork which is carefully curated into a museum-like exhibition, while the much more important part of the process, how the students designed their pieces, is usually not featured. It is for this reason that my colleague at Frisch Mrs. Ahuva Mantell, Director of Visual Arts, conceived of utilizing the Aurasma augmented reality app to showcase the student’s creative process.

Students were tasked with videoing themselves drawing or painting their work using time lapse photography which is now a standard feature on many smartphones. These videos would play automatically when a picture of the artwork was scanned using the Aurasma app as I described in my previous post on Pottery, Augmented Reality, a Zechariah Gallery Walk, a Hammer and a Nail. Watching how this came together during this magical evening taught me three important lessons about augmented reality and the Aurasma app.

Kids LOVE augmented reality.

I was first introduced to the possibilities of augmented reality in education by my good friend Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg who teaches at SAR middle school. He has always kvelled about how engaging this type of technology is for children. He even featured this as his innovative idea in last year’s Atid Innovation Challenge.

So when Mrs. Ahuva Mantell told me of her plans to use Aurasma as a part of the Evening of the Arts, I was very excited to the see the app in action. The visual arts exhibition featured a wall of auras, pictures mounted for scanning, next to a table of iPads which were only opened to the Aurasma app using Guided Access. The high school student performers and artists at the event as well as their younger siblings ran to the augmented reality wall the moment the exhibition opened and many never left. While adults struggled to figure out how to scan the pictures, the kids figured it out intuitively, scanning every single picture. Something about the magic of an expanded universe popping up when each picture was scanned drew in the kids. They then gained valuable experiences by watching how each artwork was created in the videos. I saw some kids even start creating auras of their own using the app. Aurasma is an app which can be used by anyone but now I see how it can have a particular educational benefit for younger ages.

An elementary school age student using Aurasma with his father.

One needs to follow an account on Aurasma in order to scan its auras.

While setting up the iPads hours prior to the event, I ran into a seemingly unsolvable problem. While Mrs. Mantell was able to scan all the auras using her phone, I could not get a single one to work on any of the school iPads. First I checked that the auras were publicly shared. They were. Then I thought that perhaps it was an issue with the wireless in the room. Or maybe the 2nd and 3rd generation iPads were just inferior to the more recent iPhones. Finally, I gave up, took a break, and started Googling. I soon discovered the solution. One can only scan an aura that one is following on Aurasma. I am not sure why this is the case and it adds an annoying extra step to the process. One must first create the aura, then share the aura publicly, and then the one scanning it needs to follow the account of the aura. In the case of the Evening of the Arts this was relatively easy since almost all auras were from Mrs. Mantell. So I logged into Aurasma on every iPad and followed ahuvamantell on Aurasma. You can as well.

Follow ahuvamantell on Aurasma using this link: http://auras.ma/s/UoXM4 and then scan the image above using the Aurasma app on your smartphone.

Not all pictures make good auras.

One more thing Mrs. Mantell and I realized when making auras is that not all pictures make good auras. Aurasma will often indicate this with a message saying there is a problem tracking the trigger image and suggesting one use the masking tool. In my experience, colorful images are the easiest to scan. Aurasma has a hard time with black and white or grayscale and plain white has the hardest time. I learned this when creating the trigger image for my pottery. Originally, I tried using a picture of the side of my piece which is mostly white. When this did not work after repeated attempts, I switched to an image of the inside which was much more colorful. You can see the results below.

Follow TechRav on Aurasma using this link: http://auras.ma/s/Bdesh and scan the picture in the Aurasma app.

The augmented reality piece greatly enhanced the Evening of the Arts. Now that we know how best to use it, we look forward to utilizing the app at future student showcases to add a world of exciting, multi-sensory content to the physical objects the students are displaying.