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I turned to several experts in the library technology field....
AR seems to be popping up everywhere these days, even at the liquor store. With the Living Wine Label app, users scan labels to hear historic stories associated with wines. The 19 Crimes series of Australian wines links to content about the crimes that once sent British citizens to Australia as punishment. If purveyors of spirits are tapping into the educational (and commercial) aspects of AR, librarians should certainly be paying attention.
Amid the buzz about the metaverse and the future of reality, information professionals are grappling with how best to leverage the learning potential of AR, VR, and related technologies. Are they little more than the latest in gaming experiences, or will mixed reality become integral to the future of information? I turned to several experts in the library technology field to find out.
To begin, let's go over a few basics. AR adds digital information to the user's location at the point of need. The access point could be a space (such as a room) or an object (such as a book). AR differs from VR, in which the scenarios experienced are unrelated to the user's actual environment. Of the two, AR seems to have more potential to impact the library world by merging digital and physical resources.
"The key with AR, or any technology for that matter, is to understand how it can help transform how we do a particular thing and then leverage that when it makes sense," explains David Pixton, engineering and technology librarian at Brigham Young University (BYU). Pixton researches the educational potential of AR. "In other words, what will give us a sufficient improvement in interest and learning to justify the development cost?" he asks.
Gamification
Currently, a popular use of AR is to gamify learning situations. Kari Kozak, director of the Lichtenberger Engineering Library at the University of Iowa, developed The Great Coffee Hunt: An Augmented Reality Scavenger Hunt, as a library orientation.1 It helps students learn about library resources interactively as they assist a cartoon detective gathering data to perfect his coffee-brewing skills.
A recent study on the impact of academic library orientations compared Kozak's AR version to a traditional orientation. While both positively influenced...