skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Place-based mobile AR: Technological development of mobile apps to support families to see and discuss science outdoors
Our team of educational researchers, designers, and programmers are developing a suite of mobile augmented reality (MAR) apps to support rural families to learn science outdoors during their out-of-school time. We present MAR technology designs we have used across four mobile apps for learning about cave formation, land-water interactions over geologic time, pollinators, and pollination. We describe three different MAR app features to support observing science in outdoors: 1) AR filters and visualizations; 2) digital resources tied to place and 3) photo capture and question prompts to integrate observations and science.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1811424
PAR ID:
10350495
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Editor(s):
Weinberger A.; Chen, W.; Hernandez-Leo, D.; Chen, B
Date Published:
Journal Name:
15th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Proceedings
ISSN:
1573-4552
Page Range / eLocation ID:
371-374
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) is a portable, powerful, and suitable technology that integrates digital content, e.g., 3D virtual objects, into the physical world, which not only has been implemented for multiple intents such as shopping, entertainment, gaming, etc., but it is also expected to grow at a tremendous rate in the upcoming years. Unfortunately, the applications that implement MAR, hereby referred to as MAR-Apps, bear security issues, which have been imaged in worldwide incidents such as robberies, which has led authorities to ban MAR-Apps at specific locations. Existing problems with MAR-Apps can be classified into three categories: first, Space Invasion, which implies the intrusive modification through MAR of sensitive spaces, e.g., hospitals, memorials, etc. Second, Space Affectation, which involves the degradation of users' experience via interaction with undesirable MAR or malicious entities. Finally, MAR-Apps mishandling sensitive data leads to Privacy Leaks. To alleviate these concerns, we present an approach for Policy-Governed MAR-Apps, which allows end-users to fully control under what circumstances, e.g., their presence inside a given sensitive space, digital content may be displayed by MAR-Apps. Through SpaceMediator, a proof-of-concept MAR-App that imitates the well-known and successful MAR-App Pokemon GO, we evaluated our approach through a user study with 40 participants, who recognized and prevented the issues just described with success rates as high as 92.50%. Furthermore, there is an enriched interest in Policy-Governed MAR-Apps as 87.50% of participants agreed with it, and 82.50% would use it to implement content-based restrictions in MAR-Apps These promising results encourage the adoption of our solution in future MAR-Apps. 
    more » « less
  2. Blikstein, P; Van_Aalst, J; Kizito, R; Brennan, K (Ed.)
    Mobile technologies that include photo-taking elements help to support children’s observation and exploration of the natural world; however, how families engage with digital photo-taking features have not been fully explored. We investigated how 22 families engage with digital photo-taking features of a MAR app that prompts place-based observation of the outdoors. Families’ interactions with the app were qualitatively coded and then two vignettes from different place-based micro-learning locations were developed to understand learning practices related to photo-taking. Findings show that families were deliberate in taking photos that recorded their observations of the outdoors; however, the environment and features within the app impacted families’ observational talk and excitement levels during the photo-taking activities themselves. These findings contribute to the understanding of the importance of photo-taking activities during MAR experiences. 
    more » « less
  3. Mobile apps nowadays are often packaged with third-party ad libraries to monetize user data. Many mobile ad networks exploit these mobile apps to extract sensitive real-time geographical data about the users for location-based targeted advertising. However, the massive collection of sensitive information by the ad networks has raised serious privacy concerns. Unfortunately, the extent and granularity of private data collection of the location-based ad networks remain obscure. In this work, we present a mobile tracking measurement study to characterize the severity and significance of location-based private data collection in mobile ad networks, by using an automated fine-grained data collection instrument running across different geographical areas. We perform extensive threat assessments for different ad networks using 1,100 popular apps running across 10 different cities. This study discovers that the number of location-based ads tend to be positively correlated with the population density of locations, ad networks' data collection behaviors differ across different locations, and most ad networks are capable of collecting precise location data. Detailed analysis further reveals the significant impact of geolocation on the tracking behavior of targeted ads, and a noteworthy security concern for advertising organizations to aggregate different types of private user data across multiple apps for a better targeted ad experience. 
    more » « less
  4. Mobile devices today provide a hardware-protected mode called Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to help protect users from a compromised OS and hypervisor. Today TEE can only be leveraged either by vendor apps or by developers who work with the vendor. Since vendors consider third-party app code untrusted inside the TEE, to allow an app to leverage TEE, app developers have to write the app code in a tailored way to work with the vendor’s SDK. We proposed a novel design to integrate TEE with mobile OS to allow any app to leverage the TEE. Our design incorporates TEE support at the OS level, allowing apps to leverage the TEE without adding app-specific code into the TEE, and while using existing interface to interact with the mobile OS. We implemented our design, called TruZ-Droid, by integrating TrustZone TEE with the Android OS. TruZ-Droid allows apps to leverage the TEE to protect the following: (i) user’s secret input and confirmation, and (ii) sending of user’s secrets to the authorized server. We built a prototype using the TrustZone-enabled HiKey board to evaluate our design. We demonstrated TruZ-Droid’s effectiveness by adding new security features to existing apps to protect user’s sensitive information and attest user’s confirmation. TruZ-Droid’s real-world use case evaluation shows that apps can leverage TrustZone while using existing OS APIs. Our usability study proves that users can correctly interact with TruZ-Droid to protect their security sensitive activities and data. 
    more » « less
  5. Mobile privacy and security can be a collaborative process where individuals seek advice and help from their trusted communities. To support such collective privacy and security management, we developed a mobile app for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") that allows community members to review one another’s apps installed and permissions granted to provide feedback. We conducted a four-week-long field study with 22 communities (101 participants) of friends, families, or co-workers who installed the CO-oPS app on their phones. Measures of transparency, trust, and awareness of one another’s mobile privacy and security behaviors, along with individual and community participation in mobile privacy and security co-management, increased from pre- to post-study. Interview findings confirmed that the app features supported collective considerations of apps and permissions. However, participants expressed a range of concerns regarding having community members with different levels of technical expertise and knowledge regarding mobile privacy and security that can impact motivation to participate and perform oversight. Our study demonstrates the potential and challenges of community oversight mechanisms to support communities to co-manage mobile privacy and security. 
    more » « less