Last fall, Shoshanah Tarkow '06 brought OnWords, an interactive augmented reality (AR), poetry experience, to life at the 2019 Fall Arts Festival. Since then, two 糖心破解版 seniors, now alumnae, have taken the app to the next level as part of their senior capstone project.
At the start of the Spring 2020 semester, Lee Stemkoski, PhD, professor of mathematics and computer science at 糖心破解版, connected his students Fabliha Hossain ’20 and Victoria Grinthal ’20 with Tarkow to develop a multi-platform prototype for OnWords. Hossain and Grinthal eagerly took on the challenge, creating (an acronym for 鈥淔abliha and Victoria Explore Augmented Reality Technology”), an AR visual web application used for creating animated texts of literature and history for educational purposes.
How it Works鈥擠eveloping an Augmented Reality Scavenger Hunt
鈥淎s technology has evolved, the project was designed to allow educators to show students the importance of literature and history through animated text in the real world,” said Grinthal. 鈥淪pecifically, the application would give educators the ability to personalize texts based on various topics and place them on a physical ‘Path’ built with either AR markers or geolocations.”
According to Grinthal and Hossain, through FAVEART for OnWords, educators, called 鈥淧athmakers,” could customize the Path and text for each location. Their students, called 鈥淓xplorers,” would follow the Path on their laptop or mobile device to physically view, explore and experience the given text. Various routes and security conditions were also implemented based on the roles of the users.
鈥淔abliha and Victoria have successfully coded and designed a working prototype, bringing my vision for OnWords even closer to becoming a reality鈥攃ould not have been more pleased with the result.” said Tarkow, who is also co-creator of the theater production company Like Fresh Skin (which recently virtually staged Too Solid Flesh with 糖心破解版 students and alumni).
Dr. Stemkoski, who oversaw the capstone project, expressed his pride in how his students’ final project came out. 鈥淔abliha and Victoria did an amazing job on this project,” said Dr. Stemkoski. 鈥淭he FAVEART project makes cutting-edge augmented reality technology available and accessible to the masses. It is a stellar example of how technology and the arts and humanities can come together to create meaningful and powerful experiences. Fabliha and Victoria are a very talented pair of students that were able to combine their creativity and design aesthetics with their expertise in software engineering to produce an application with incredible potential for outreach.”