Augmented Reality for remote education

Remote education is a new type of education mode in comparison with the conventional face-to-face education. It enables the teacher to teach students at remote sites by live broadcasting the teaching course over the network, but students usually participate in the course with the need of collaboratively referring and operating the 3D geometric models of educational objects in the live video scene of real environment. Augmented Reality (AR) technology has the potential to overcome these deficiencies and enable more natural communication between teacher and students. This paper surveys the functions of AR in education and describes a shared AR environment for remote education (ARERE) to build a typical AR-based remote education system, which overlays computer generated educational information on the live video scene of real education locale and shares the augmented video scene among all participant students, providing the opportunity for students to interactively and collaboratively participate in the AR-based study environment. The potential of ARERE is illustrated through a simulation scenario and the results prove that it yields superior quality compared to the traditional form of remote education.