Kathleen Gray*, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Kristine Elliott, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Ryan Naylor, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Greg Wadley, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Track: Research Presentation Topic: Collaborative biomedical research, academic / scholarly communication, publishing and peer review Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: LKSC Conference Center Stanford Room: Lower Auditorium 120 Date: 2011-09-18 12:00 PM – 01:00 PM Last modified: 2011-08-12

If you are the presenter of this abstract (or if you cite this abstract in a talk or on a poster), please show the QR code in your slide or poster (QR code contains this URL).

Background
Science communicators have advocated engagement as an important precursor to public understanding of science, and have sought to facilitate engagement by immersion in a scientific environment. The advent of new social media technologies has increased the opportunities available for biomedical scientists to engage the general public in their work. Smartphone-based augmented reality (AR) is one such technology. In the phone’s camera viewfinder real-time geospatial and other internet data are overlaid on the real-time view of the phone user’s actual location, thus augmenting this view and creating a blended world.
We hypothesized that AR is capable of providing the benefits of both mobile learning and locative media. AR can provide a unique mode of public access to biomedical research information, and strengthen laypeople’s sense of engagement with that information and those who generate it, by linking such information to physical sites of biomedical research for the attention of laypeople who pass by or stop in the vicinity. Methods
We undertook a pilot study of AR user acceptance, in a metropolitan precinct housing several internationally renowned biomedical research institutions. We selected Wikitude World Browser version 5.0 (wikitude.org and wikitude.me) to create a prototype “world” containing six research institutes within the precinct as points of interest (POI), and we designed web content about each institute for smartphone-based access. For one POI, a more detailed information architecture was developed, and information of several different levels of complexity was provided (authoring focussed chiefly on repurposing existing rich media content freely available online) to allow us to examine how users responded to each level, and which levels they found accessible. Eleven volunteers with no biomedical expertise were observed while using the prototype application on an iPhone in the precinct and interviewed afterward. Usability research design and data analysis were based on an established usability testing framework.
Results
More than half the participants commented that the application was handy, safe and enjoyable, and that they felt confident using it and would recommend it to others. When asked about the usefulness of the application to access locative-sensitive biomedical research information, most participants responded favourably. Participants expressed a range of personal preferences for the types of information presented and how that information was structured. Participants were unable to clearly describe the effect of locative media on their learning, and identified a number of issues with the Wikitude browser interface. Nevertheless, when prompted, more than half were able to report something new that they had learned from this brief experience of using mobile AR, mostly gleaned from the least scholarly or technical content provided in the “world”.
Conclusion
The challenge for biomedical science communicators using new social media is to provide user friendly, accessible, robust information architectures, as well as to allow users to explore complex information according to their personal preferences. Recent software upgrades to the Wikitude AR browser may better address some of the criticism arising from user acceptance testing in this pilot study. Further content enhancements also are likely to increase the application’s suitability to the mobile context. The largely positive feedback from our proof-of-concept study suggests that smartphone-based AR has potential to increase public engagement with the biomedical research endeavour. Further research on a larger scale is needed to yield statistically significant results and deeper insights into the dynamics of using locative media for mobile learning of this kind.