Welcome to the MIT Teacher Education Program's Handheld Augmented Reality Simulations Site

The MIT Teacher Education Program, in conjunction with The Education Arcade, has been working on creating "Augmented Reality" simulations to engage people in simulation games that combine real world experiences with additional information supplied to them by handheld computers.

The first of these games, Environmental Detectives (ED), is an outdoor game in which players using GPS guided handheld computers try to uncover the source of a toxic spill by interviewing virtual characters and conducting large scale simulated environmental measurements and analyzing data. This game has been run at three sites, including MIT, a nearby nature center, and a local high school. Early research has shown that this mode of learning is successful in engaging university and secondary school students in large scale environmental engineering studies, and providing an authentic mode of scientific investigation.

The next generation of simulations was moved indoors using Wi-Fi enabled Pocket PCs. Using location provided by the Wi-Fi network, players in Mystery @ The Museum (M@M) are engaged in a large scale "Who Done It" at Boston's Museum of Science. Working in teams players must battle time, use virtual clues, discover and understand information contained within the museum and apprehend a virtual criminal using their deductive skills.

In 2004 we have developed two new games - Charles River City (CRC), a second generation outdoor GPS based game, and Outbreak @ MIT (O@MIT), an indoor client-server based game that opens new opportunities for educational AR games. More detail on these games is provided through the indoor and outdoor links on the left.

Coming Soon (Summer/Fall 2005) - Build your own AR simulation with the TEP AR editor and Pocket PC client. We will be releasing a "beta" version of software that students and teachers can use to build their own AR games later this year. Watch this space for announcements.