Augmented Reality Will Revolutionize the Geology Classroom

Does anyone remember the cartoon series the Magic School Bus? Ok, maybe we’re getting old.

The series saw a chirpy teacher take her students on incredible school trips using that titular magic bus, which could shrink to explore the human body on a molecular scale or use rocket boosters to travel the solar system.

While geology students aren’t about to be shrunk down to the size of a molecule in order to explore rock formations, augmented reality (AR) is allowing them to do the next best thing.

A group at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Martin Pratt, is developing some very interesting apps that tap into that immense potential.

The team has been working on apps such as the already-released GeoXplorer (for iOS and Android). Developed using the Unity game engine, the app allows users to visualize the way atoms are arranged in a large selection of crystalline structure models for different minerals. There are also many different rock types, and even entire rock outcrops, that can all be visualized in 3-D.

The group is developing its apps both for smartphone devices and for AR headsets, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens.

“You want to represent that data, not in a projective way like you would do on a screen on a textbook, but actually in a three-dimensional way,” Pratt explained in an interview with Ars Technica.

“So you can actually look around it [and] manipulate it exactly how you would do in real life,” he continued. “The thing with augmented reality that we found most attractive [compared to virtual reality] is that it provides a much more intuitive teacher-student setting. You’re not hidden behind avatars. You can use body-language cues [like] eye contact to direct people to where you want to go.”