Microsoft HoloLens – Forever Changing Education & Training By Steven Schain Education is made more immersive and engaging with augmented reality devices. Over the last several years, the cutting edge of learning development has been enhancing the learning experience with emerging technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality. While virtual reality (VR) has been in the public eye for more than a decade, augmented reality (AR) is a term that many people were unfamiliar with. That all changed when Microsoft announced their HoloLens head-mounted display. Now, teachers and educational researchers are looking at the use of tools like the HoloLens to enhance the educational experience, motivate students, and teach in ways that have never before been possible. 10 imagery overlaid on the world you see through the lenses. This is the fundamental difference between AR and VR, as VR isolates your eyes from the outside world, so that everything you see is computer-generated. The HoloLens is by no means the first implementation of AR. The military and researchers have been using the technology since the mid 1970s as Helmet Mounted Displays (HMDs) for sighting targets. However, today’s AR technology has advanced far beyond those early days. With the advent of powerful graphics processors and increasingly smaller high-resolution displays, AR programs can be accessed right from your phone, using your phone’s display. Microsoft’s HoloLens A Brief History of AR takes this one step further, providing you a stereo First, some background on what augmented reality view of the world around you, and blending it is and why it differs so much from virtual reality. seamlessly with the computer-generated content. When you look through a pair of corrective lenses, you are in fact seeing a sort of augmented reality, AR in the Classroom since the lens From distorts the elementary view to allow school to you to see advanced better. The AR systems training, Microsoft HoloLens, Microsoft, 2016 created by the AR provides a HoloLens works rich set of tools to engage learners in new and in a similar exciting ways. For example, AR can enhance fashion, except students’ ability to understand the human body that it uses and its systems as they learn biology and LCD displays to physiology. With a group of students and the show computer- Integrated Helmet Display Sight System, instructor all wearing the HoloLens, the instructor U.S. Army, 1985 generated www.cadlearning.com