Last spring I had the opportunity to work with Nisma Zaman on a series of assistive technology projects for inpatient kids at NYU’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. The overarching goal for this project was to try and find ways to create entertaining technology driven-experiences for patients to play with in the center’s main recreation room. The following video shows our first game, called “PairBurst Memory,” in action.
“PairBurst Memory,” is an augmented reality matching game that asks kids to try and find pairs of 3D animals that are “hidden” behind pieces of a wooden puzzle. The game setup consists of a ceiling mounted projector, a Mac Mini, a wooden puzzle board and a webcam that is mounted slightly above and behind the player. The game software is designed to track a series of nine symbols that exist underneath each puzzle piece. When visible, the PairBurst software will augment the uncovered symbols with one of four 3D animals. Upon finding a match the animals will fly off of their spaces and land in the center of the board. When all four matches are found the animals fly back and celebrate by having a 3D dance party.
As I’ve mentioned in a number of previous posts, I’ve been actively working on a new version of the ZooBurst 3D pop-up book creator. This new version is currently scheduled for release at the end of August 2010, and will be chock full of new features, including:
Privacy options: Designate your books as public to the world, password protected or completely private
Customizable backgrounds: No more canned backdrops! You can color your own backgrounds as well as drag and drop images onto the background to make your own landscapes for your books.
Sound effects: Choose from a library of sound effects to bring your characters to life.
Record your own voice: Use your computer’s microphone to record your own voice to have your characters “speak” when they are clicked
Classroom management: Teachers will be able to easily set up private spaces for their students inside of ZooBurst. Classes in ZooBurst can be public, private or password protected, and teachers can set up usernames and passwords for all students in their class using a simple classroom dashboard tool.
Here’s a quick video shows some of these new features in action.
Hello, blog! Sorry I’ve been so lax with posting. I just got back from my summer teaching assignment out in Mallorca Spain. This year, as in previous years, I taught a section of “Educational Applications of Technology” for a group of amazing international school teachers and administrators. Our class blog is available here if you want to check out what we covered during the summer term.
The summer palace of King Juan Carlos (visible from my old apartment!) - This is where Michelle Obama is meeting the royal family this week on her vacation to Spain.
Mallorca Graduation Summer 2010
TCNJ Mallorca Graduation Celebration, July 2010
Now that I’m back I’m focusing on getting the new version of ZooBurst up and running. This new version contains a host of new features that were suggested by the comunity of over 3,900 (!) teachers who have signed up since May 2010. These features include:
Sound effects via a searchable sound library
Audio recording to allow your characters to “speak” using your own voice
Customizable backgrounds
Advanced page management features (reorder, drag and drop, duplication, etc.)
Privacy options
Classroom management mode for teachers
… and some other surprises!
We’re shooting to have this new framework up and running in time for the beginning of the school year here in North America. I’ll keep you posted as the release date gets closer.
Thanks to everyone who attended my Augmented Reality workshop this afternoon at the NMC 2010 Summer Conference! I’ve posted all of the materials referenced in the session, including downloadable versions of the Flash templates that we covered in class . Everything is accessible via the ‘Getting Started with AR’ link at the top of this page.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch – thanks again for a great session!
Over the last few weeks a number of ZooBursters have gotten in touch to ask if there was a way in which they could interact with their 3D pop-up books without having to print out an augmented reality marker. Many people don’t have easy access to a decent quality printer, and while you can use an external device in place of a marker (see Greg Borenstein’s exploration into using an iPad in place of an AR marker) the glare issues that arise from using a backlit display can be a bit difficult to overcome. Plus it’s hard to enjoy your 3D creation while holding something up in front of your screen!
In response to these issues I’ve built an experimental features that lets you display your ZooBurst book on the screen without needing to have an AR marker handy. Once activated, this feature will cause your book to fall out of the sky and bounce into place along the bottom of the video field (see image below). In addition, a new control tab also appears at the top of the page – this tab “listens” for “swipes” in the video feed. When detected, these swipes can be used to control the page turning action.
Controlling a ZooBurst book using physical gestures
Here’s a quick video of how the new feature works:
