touch technology vs augmented reality
Advantages and disadvantages of interaction in an immersive room
In 3walls rooms there are two options to create interaction with the projection boards. The first option is the most familiar – touch. You touch with a special pen or with your finger and the interaction happens. The second way is with the help of augmented reality applications on tablets or phones. The meaning of this is that the phone identifies an object projected on the board and pops information to the phone as a layer above what the camera captures. The information layer can be text, image or video.
Each of these ways of interaction has advantages and disadvantages when it comes to 3walls immersive rooms or any other immersive/interactive rooms.
immersive room
Touch interaction
Advantages:
\- Ease of operation – Direct interaction by touching screens is intuitive and easy to use. No need for an additional end device with an app and it is very simple to operate the room.
\- Ease of creating content – Easy to find relevant content or generate it. This is because in 3walls rooms any website or site that has interactivity becomes interactive on the projection boards. So teachers can search Google for activities created for example in wordwall or genially and embed them in the software and get interactive content that engages students in the immersive classroom.
\- The activity will be very playful and fun.
Disadvantages:
\- High costs.
\- The more technological complexity there is more technical problems that arise.
\- The activity is limited to – 3 students per screen and therefore the activity can simultaneously contain up to 9 students. If there are more students, they need to be provided with employment outside the boards.
\- If the activity is characterized by information, that is, clicking on an object opens an information window, then there is no possibility to “take” the information to the workspace and work on the tasks with the information open opposite the students’ work.
Interaction using augmented reality on tablets / phones
Advantages:
\– Augmented reality allows rich virtual content layered on real environments. That is, the information conveyed can be deeper and broader. For example, video clips that are activated or longer activations.
Students’ phones already exist and relying on them allows you not to spend money building the room. Tablets are relatively inexpensive devices and when it comes to one tablet for every 3-4 children the expenditure is not high.
\- Users can move freely and not be attached to the projection screens and therefore it is possible to activate larger groups of students.
Disadvantages:
\- Creating the content is much more complex because it requires the activation of an additional application.
\- More complex operation since students need to install an app and sometimes even scan the triggers that the app identifies into the phones.
\- Users may experience fatigue from holding tablets for prolonged periods