A Teaching Kinematics: Augmented Reality and Virtualization in the Observation

Our paper reports on an ongoing experiment aiming to use broadly principles and methods from virtual reality and augmented reality for didactical purposes. The specific field in which these methodologies have been proposed, studied and implemented, at a first stage, is in teaching physics, in particular, kinematics. Key idea is that of providing the observer, an elementary school student, with real time information on the kinematics of some moving object on which experiments are being carried on. This real time information will be provided by using the methods of augmented reality, that is mixing images from the real world with synthetic data; this is done just adding to the moving objects computer generated images for velocities and accelerations; thus the user may watch to a physical experiment by means of a webcam: on the computer screen he will see real bodies and superimposed to these relevant graphical annotations, mainly vectors for velocities; also virtualization is achieved by means of sonification of the events; sounds controlled by speed, varying speed (acceleration), crashes and similar are superimposed to the real scene in order to provide evidence of the events by means of augmented perception, using in this case, the acoustical channel for communicating events and parameters of the environment.