Assistant Professor Namkoong Receives $20,000 Pilot Grant for Augmented Reality Research

Assistant Professor Kang Namkoong is the Principal Investigator on a $20,000 one-year pilot research grant from the National Children’s Cancer for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety (NCCRAHS). The main goals of this pilot study are to (1) develop an innovative farm safety education program entitled, Augmented Reality Intervention for Safety Education (ARISE), for farm parents and children, (2) examine the feasibility and usability of the AR health intervention, and (3) evaluate the potential of the intervention as a sustainable agricultural safety education program.

AR technology enables us to provide a high level of system-user interactivity, which allows users to freely change angles and distance to the simulations with seamless transitions. Thus, ARISE is expected to help improve the quality of farm safety education, because it is designed to provide the participants with: (1) maximum autonomy in their use of the intervention; (2) vivid second-hand experience of incidents that frequently occur in farms; and (3) interactive learning tools that present farm safety tutorials.

News from: http://comm.umd.edu/spotlight/GRID