The Project

  • Learning basic concepts of Physics like Newton’s laws of Motion, Electromagnetism etc. made easy using augmented reality (AR)
  • AR provides a more interactive way to learn the concepts. Students tend to retain concepts better through interaction and visual representation rather than reading about the concepts in a textbook.
  • The user will be able to select which concept they would like to learn about and place the appropriate objects on the ground plane.
  • The user can then interact with the augmented objects, change the parameters like force etc and see how the augmented object react/change
  • Puzzles and exercises to review concepts using AR
  • Different levels of difficulty

Sai Phaltankar

MS Candidate

Adhokshith Datta

MS Candidate

Ramnarayanan Vannia Samy

MS Candidate. UIC

Details


Which hardware platform or platforms you want to develop your application for:

HTC VIVE, LeapMotion


What software you plan to use to write the application:

Unity, Vuforia, ARCore (whichever one is more suitable for the implementation)


Links to any datasets or libraries or archives of images or objects that you plan to use:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280576271_Using_Augmented_Reality_for_Teaching_Physics

http://www3.abe.iastate.edu/ar-physics.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZSpuN9B5Xo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AssZz718ASs

Project Details

We are currently in the age of technology and it seems to be playing an important role in replacing many age old traditions. The education system is highly reliant on using textbooks to teach students various physics concepts. While this may be the standard, with the evolution of augmented reality, the entire learning experience can become much more interactive and fun. We look to incorporate table top augmented reality to provide students with an interactive physics learning application. There are many examples in textbooks to illustrate concepts but it is hard for a student to imagine how a certain example works by just reading the text. If they could pull out their phones and visually be able to see the example come to life and interact with it, they would understand the concepts much more clearly.


For the scope of the project, we look to include some of the basic physics concepts such as

  • Motion and Forces (Linear motion, projectile motion, torque etc)
  • Electricity and Magnetism
  • Gravity
  • If time permits, we would also like to have conservation of energy

The idea is that when students are studying from a textbook, when they come across a concept/formulae, they will be able to watch the concept in action on their table top. The user will be able to interact with the objects, change the variables, position and orientation and see how the physics is affected. This way, they will be able to understand the how the variables are related to each other. A simple example to illustrate this is a ball rolling down an inclined plane. The student understands that the ball rolls down the plane. Given the dimensions of the inclined plane, the student can also figure out the speed of the ball rolling down an inclined plane. But how will the speed change if the angle of inclination is increased? What if the ball had some initial velocity? How would the speed change if there was some wind pushing it in the opposite direction? How does the size of the ball affect the speed? Students usually struggle with these kind of complications because they cannot visualize and actually understand the applications of a formula. This is where the augmented reality application will be able to help the students. They can interact with the environment to learn in a more interactive manner.


We are planning on having two different modes for the project

  1. Learning mode

    User can learn various concepts. Interact with the surroundings and add their own different obstacles to see how the physics of an object is altered. (Limited set of options that can be added by the user)

  2. Challenge mode

    Based on the concepts learned, there will be some puzzles/challenges that the player will have to solve. These are small physics puzzles which are gamified to keep the user interested and help in creating a fun environment.

While these are the proposed parts of the project, we still need to strictly identify which concepts will be covered and define the scope of the project for the semester.