A research project that uses wireless handheld devices to engage students in an augmented reality-based educational environment could have a big impact on future learning, its creators say.

The Handheld Augmented Reality Project (HARP), a collaboration among Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, uses wireless handheld computers to enhance teaching and learning through a series of activities that draw on the attributes of students' surroundings.

"Augmented reality" is an environment in which virtual images have been layered on top of those in the real world. In other words, augmented reality is the ability to use a computer program to superimpose a layer of virtual characters or other sensory information onto any location.

Augmented reality uses global positioning system (GPS) technology to track a person's movement, and when that person reaches a designated point, he or she is confronted with a computer-generated image or situation pertaining to the scenario. (For more information, see "'Augmented reality' soon could enhance learning'.)

A sample HARP activity, dubbed "Alien Contact," assumes that aliens have landed on Earth, and students must work through math and literacy problems to figure out why the aliens have landed. Students use GPS-enabled handheld computers and form theories based on evidence they collect at certain GPS "hot spots." As students get within 20 to 30 feet of each designated hot spot, they can complete the assigned activity.

Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, along with postdoctoral fellow and colleague Matt Dunleavy, discussed the HARP initiative and its implications for education at this year's Florida Educational Technology Conference in Orlando Jan. 26.

The project arose from "trying to think about where society is going, what students will need, what the educational properties of these devices are, and how we can design something interesting with these devices," Dede said. These discussions led the researchers to develop a project based on augmented reality.

HARP is supported by a three-year U.S. Department of Education grant aimed at enhancing math and literacy skills in urban school populations. In addition to the three research universities, the program draws on the opinions of teachers as co-researchers.

"The feedback from teachers is incredibly vital and important," said Dunleavy.

There are two kinds of augmented reality: place-dependent and place-independent. Dede and his colleagues are working with place-independent augmented reality, which is useful for several reasons, he explained.

One application of augmented reality that already exists is "based on a Revolutionary War battlefield--and you actually see the distances and the topography during the activity, and that's a strong form of augmented reality," Dede said. "But you have to get there [first]. For schools to take field trips is expensive, complicated, and often impractical. To make it place-independent is more practical, because you don't have to arrange multiple field trips."