Remote hands-on experience: distributed collaboration with augmented reality

One claim of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) is to support and exploit benefits from distance learning and remote collaboration. On the other hand, several approaches to learning emphasize the importance of hands-on experience. Unfortunately, these two goals don't go well together with traditional learning techniques. Even though TEL technologies can alleviate this problem, it is not sufficiently solved yet - remote collaboration usually comes at the cost of losing direct hands-on access. The ARiSE project aimed at bringing Augmented Reality (AR) to School Environments, a technology that can potentially bridge the gap between the two goals mentioned. The project has designed, implemented and evaluated a pedagogical reference scenario where students worked hands-on together over large distances. This paper describes the AR learning approach we followed and discusses its implementation and its future potential. It shows a simple and successful distributed AR learning approach and suggests features for improvement.