Augmented Reality in Prayer

This is one for the RE teachers out there.

Today we had our Team Day and I was on prayer with @jpilearn. Obviously we wanted to get people involved, ideally in our case with the aid of eLearning. Walking past the banner for the Year of Grace I had a bit of an epiphany (pardon the pun) whilst reading Pope John Paul II's statement: 

'Keep Jesus Christ in your heart and you will see his face in every human being.'

I had been wanting to play around with augmented reality for a while and here was the perfect opportunity to use the contemporary world to bring a prayer alive. The simple procedure was as follows:

1. Download Aurasma Lite app on all iPads
2. Create a channel
3. Subscribe all iPads to that channel
4. Find a variety of images (in this case hearts)
5. Print them off and stick on cards
6. Mount the cards on name labels
7. Find a variety of images new images (in this case images of the face of Christ)
8. Save to Camera Roll of main iPad
9. Using Aurasma, scan each heart individually and link to a particular face of Christ
10. Ask everyone to wear a heart. During the prayer ask people to take an iPad (already logged onto wireless and primed in Aurasma) and 'look into the heart' of their colleagues. 
11. Observe the awe and wonder of your colleagues

Check out the footage of this in action:

 

This of course could be used for any learning or group activity. 

A technical tip with Aurasma is to use images with good contrast i.e. light against dark. We found that pastel images were not recognised very easily.

Have a go. Enjoy!