Measuring and Assessing Augmented Reality Potential for Educational Purposes: SmartMarca Project

Augmented and Virtual reality proved to be valuable solutions to convey contents in a more appealing and interactive way. Their use is nearly embracing several domains like medicine, geospatial applications, industry, tourism and so on. But among the others, the one that might benefit the most by their use is the Cultural Heritage. In fact, given the improvement of mobile and smart devices in terms of both usability and computational power, contents can be easily conveyed with a realism level never reached in the past. However, despite the tremendous number of researches related with the presentation of new fascinating applications of ancient goods and artifacts augmentation, few papers are focusing on the real effect that these tools have on learning. In fact, whether a disposable use of such tools seems to have a great benefit in terms of visual impact for the users, the same cannot be said about the long-term effect they have on the users, especially for education purposes. Within the framework of SmartMarca project, that will be briefly explained in these pages, this paper focuses on assessing the potential of AR applications specifically designed for Cultural Heritage. More specifically, tests have been conducted on an Augmented Reality experience upon different paintings. For evaluating the benefits of such technology in terms of learning, we have performed our experiment on classrooms of teenagers. By testing different learning approaches, we were able to evaluate and assess the effectiveness of using these technologies for the education process. The paper will even argue on the necessity of developing new tools to enable users to become producers of contents of AR/VR experiences, since up to now there no exists a platform specifically designed for an agile creation, even for not skilled programmers.