News Story

New standard for Augmented Reality

John Domingue, Friday 20 Feb 2015

KMi research in the Theme ‘Learning by Experience’ was rewarded today with the establishment of a new working group within the IEEE standards association.

The expert working group within will elaborate a proposal for augmented reality learning experience models (IEEE AR-LEM), with an early draft scheduled for the late summer and a first ballot possible as early as 2016.

The proposed Augmented Reality (AR) learning experience model will specify how to represent learning activities and their according workplace reference models in a standardized interchange format in order to lower entry barriers for authoring of learning experience spanning real world interaction using sensors and computer vision, and web applications.
Purpose of the standards working group is to develop an overarching integrated conceptual model and the according data model specifications for representing activities, learning context and environment (aka ‘workplace’), and potentially other data model components needed for AR-enhanced learning activities.
Separation of slow-changing data for, e.g., environment descriptions from fast-changing data as, e.g., required for step by step guidance is intended and isolation in linked, but physically separate interchange formats is intended to facilitate efficient handling and storage.
The new standards committee (NesCom) of the IEEE has appointed KMi’s Fridolin Wild to chair this working group.

“This new standard will help bring down production costs of augmented reality experiences significantly, turning normal web-designers into augmented reality engineers”, so Wild. He denotes further: “I’m very glad that we’re entering this working group with a strong Open University proposal, that we’ve elaborated with partners across the EU in our TELLME research project”.

Interested parties are invited to contact the chair of the working group, Fridolin Wild, for more information on how to participate in the community process. A dedicated website with more information will follow soon