Have you ever heard of augmented reality?Wikipedia describes it here. My description would be that you can hold up a camera or phone, usually pointing it at a symbol and then you can see things on your screen. Once you print out the symbol, it looks like the webcam is pointing at the piece of paper on your desk, but then magic happens.
I found Zooburst about 5 hours ago. @relativism posted a link to and her blog and it looked amazing, but I was working so I resisted. Then @xannov started playing and blogged here about it..so I had to have a go myself. It’s still in the very early stages and it takes a few hours for your account to be setup, but it is well worth it.
Once you log-in, you have a few sentences of instructions to read and then you’re away. Choose a background, choose some pictures, write a story. Job done. Once you’ve done all of this, save your book, switch on your webcam and be amazed. You’ll need to put it into webcam mode and print out the ZB logo. Then point your cam at the logo and your story will appear on your screen. I found it worked best when blu-tacking the logo to the wall.
Go and see Toby in his little adventure here, if you see a speech bubble, click on it as Toby might have something to say. This took me no more than 5 minutes to make which you will see is very evident! But it is simple, click, drag and select pictures.
What can you make? Can you make the stories come alive?
Full book available here: http://alpha.zooburst.com/index.php?viewbook=2571
The webcam mode makes me think about that webcam setup I discribed for the class attention system. Great fun little tool, I like 🙂