Augmented Reality: Education

(Post for week of 9/6)
In the video above I was intrigued by the applications of augmented reality systems to education. Children are shown wearing goggles looking at a book with markings on it. The goggles recognize the markings and display a 3D image of a volcano erupting. The student can swivel the page and see the animated volcano.
The functionality is not something new. You could imagine the same functionality on a computer. With the mouse you could swivel the volcano demonstration around, and with buttons you could enable zooming (achieving the same effect as the student moving the goggles closer or farther from the model). But I think there’s much more interaction when you are interacting with a book you can hold, swivel, flip pages, rather than just look at a computer screen. The goggles change the interface from a computer screen to something much more interactive.
A final thought: It seems a bit of a stretch to consider the volcano application an example of augmented reality. The physical reality that is being augmented is the black and white marker on the page. However her imagining what it would be like to walk down a street in a foreign country and see information about the culture, history, buildings would be a much richer case of augmented reality.