Immersive Education: 2035
Futures envisioning project for Apple Education as part of the Design@USC masters program.
The alternative futures method involves looking at 4 scenarios: growth, collapse, constraint, and transformation. My team was assigned growth; we interviewed educators to verify emerging signals that would morph into institutional trends, and developed a cohesive vision of the future based on the spread of AR technology, embrace of storytelling and personalized learning tracks, and renewed focus on equitable access to these advances. I led the visual design of the project, assembled and animated the presentation, and took a leading role during interviews and our ideation processes.
Futures envisioning project for Apple Education as part of the Design@USC masters program.
The alternative futures method involves looking at 4 scenarios: growth, collapse, constraint, and transformation. My team was assigned growth; we interviewed educators to verify emerging signals that would morph into institutional trends, and developed a cohesive vision of the future based on the spread of AR technology, embrace of storytelling and personalized learning tracks, and renewed focus on equitable access to these advances. I led the visual design of the project, assembled and animated the presentation, and took a leading role during interviews and our ideation processes.
One of our 'artifacts' was a walkthrough of Ms. Macintosh's outdoor AR Park class session setup.
My speaker's notes for the visualization section I presented follow below.
"The first thing Ms. Macintosh does after arriving to the park with most of her class is to deploy a remote learning drone—a quiet camera in the sky that will allow students who couldn't make this week's trip to the Park to still participate in video recording and storytelling activities, talking their drone around the augmented environment from many miles away in perfect sync. She then takes out her lightweight AR glasses.
AR Glasses are as commonly seen in this day and age as shoes, having largely replaced TVs, computers, and smartphones thanks to advances in cloud processing and internet infrastructure mandates. The technology's low cost comes at the price of yet another subcription for personal digital assistants to tend to each month. These glasses allow for any location to serve as an education environment, and thanks to close-proximity eye tracking, make many powerful features simple to use at a glance.
AR Glasses are as commonly seen in this day and age as shoes, having largely replaced TVs, computers, and smartphones thanks to advances in cloud processing and internet infrastructure mandates. The technology's low cost comes at the price of yet another subcription for personal digital assistants to tend to each month. These glasses allow for any location to serve as an education environment, and thanks to close-proximity eye tracking, make many powerful features simple to use at a glance.
Macintosh dons her specs, which Seamlessly connect to a high-speed internet access point, and scan her surroundings, matching her GPS position and cardinal heading to the park's AR object map. She looks down to bring up an education interface. Herself a digital native, Ms. Macintosh is more than capable of managing multiple education tracks for students in several of the subjects she teaches—especially with the help of her virtual assistant. She curates tailored classwork generated based on scholastic histories and psychological profiles to help her students develop problem-solving competencies that will help them pursue their passions as their educations progress in many different directions.
She launches the augmented reality reef, glad that her students were screened for thalasophobia before being offered to participate in this trip. Sean, her edu-partner for today, begins to explain how excess heat can cause corals to drive out their algae, turning a bleached white. The students in his group hope to grow up and become famous scientists paid to harvest rare compounds produced in newly built coral reefs. The rest of the children are working on creating an AR video story to share on social media about the importance of reefs to biodiversity and coastal foodchains, with the help of Lala the Education influencer, and their voice assistants—who take the form of colorful emperor angelfish, audio synced to the motion tracked models to sell the illusion through spatial audio."
She launches the augmented reality reef, glad that her students were screened for thalasophobia before being offered to participate in this trip. Sean, her edu-partner for today, begins to explain how excess heat can cause corals to drive out their algae, turning a bleached white. The students in his group hope to grow up and become famous scientists paid to harvest rare compounds produced in newly built coral reefs. The rest of the children are working on creating an AR video story to share on social media about the importance of reefs to biodiversity and coastal foodchains, with the help of Lala the Education influencer, and their voice assistants—who take the form of colorful emperor angelfish, audio synced to the motion tracked models to sell the illusion through spatial audio."
Full speaker's notes AND CONTENT available in the Keynote FILE
