As part of a renewed deal between tech giant Samsung and the British Museum, the former are bringing augmented reality learning to the latter’s exhibitions.
Ask anyone who’s out of the know and they’ll tell you that technology is for time wasters. It’s for people who have nothing better to do with their time, they might say, citing Angry Birds and ‘that Twitter thing’ as excuses to squirrel all of our time away, in an effort to procrastinate on being productive. And in many cases, they’ll be right. While there are more than a handful of hype-based anomalies that focus on making the most of your time (usually built in apps or extra services like Evernote are the ones that get a lot of mentions), much of what hear about on smartphones and tablets often tends to be games, even if this isn’t reflective of the bigger App Store or Google Play picture. Now, harnessing the great power and popularity of their tablets, Samsung are working with the British Museum to bring augmented reality enabled, historical learning to kids and adults alike.
The new project comes about as part of a Samsung and British Museum partnership, which has been going on for quite some time. This new deal, which extends the contract for another 5 years, sees an upgrade on the Digital Discovery Centre installed at the museum, which started its humble beginnings as a computer room. What advancements in technology means now is that the British Museum will have its own app too, allowing for greater interaction with the exhibits. Called “A Gift for Athena” and running on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, it tasks the user with various challenges. One example detailed saw the user finding various statues from outlines, then having to line them up using the tablet and app’s augmented reality (AR) capabilities, before being rewarded with another piece to the puzzle, being shown on a map which part of the museum to go to in an effort to solve it.
A Gift for Athena is said to be both fun for all ages as well as being something special in terms of technology as developers of the title, Gamar, have worked on it for months to overcome problems with normal AR limitations, resulting in an app that works well and is educational too. The British Museum states that around 130,000 UK students and 250,000 International students visit the museum a year and so A Gift for Athena, in addition to plans to teach visitors about 3D printing and animation, will make for a good trip for all.
We’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: pocket-lint
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