Wouldn’t it be great to be able to exhibit whatever aura you wanted, especially for a job interview? That’s not the kind of aura I’m going to talk about here but having the skill to create this type of Aura would look pretty innovative on a resume. An Aura is what the augmented reality application Aurasma calls a single unit made up of a triggering image and all of the digital information like text, image, video, audio files or GPS data attached to it. Aurasma has received many positive reviews from teachers (see Common Sense Education’s review of Aurasma) as a tool that allows users to design their own augmented reality experiences, and offers a free version.
 
I’ve managed to build one Aura of my own that you can view if you have the app, by searching for either “KarinLisk” or “Toucan in Costa Rica” or #toucan-in-Costa-Rica, or hover over this photo with your smartphone. 

I’d love some feedback if you do find this Aura because I haven’t been able to view it as a visitor would since my smartphone doesn’t have a data plan.  Let me know if you hear the toucan calling.
 
This is a really cool tool and since I’m an information junkie I imagine so many uses for it but I have some concerns about its use in education, particularly with minors. One problem I see is that any viewer must download the app to a mobile device in order to view an Aura and in the process of downloading it they are asked for a credit card number. I skipped this step and it allowed me to open up anyway but I don’t know if that would be true for someone who didn’t already have an account with Aurasma Studio.

In regards to Intellectual Property Rights, this is what the website has to say:

“ No transfer of ownership of any intellectual property will occur under this Agreement. Customer grants HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right and license to any intellectual property that is necessary for HP and its designees to perform the ordered services (including SaaS and the Customer Content). If deliverables are created by HP specifically for Customer and identified as such in Supporting Material, HP hereby grants Customer a worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid, royalty-free license to reproduce and use copies of the deliverables internally.”
 
I’ll have to delve deeper into Aurasma’s Terms of Use to better understand the implications for privacy before I introduce it to learning activities in my classroom or at the marine station, but I definitely want to create more Auras. Wouldn’t it be cool to hold your phone up to still images of animals in the aquaria at the marine station to bring up videos of the animals in other situations, like a crab moulting or an urchin spawning, or so when the visitors come to see the octopus and she won’t come out of her den, they can view videos of her feeding or playing without us having to hang a monitor somewhere. I found it was fairly easy to create my first Aura but I can see that putting all the best content together in Auras is going to be time consuming. Building them will make great projects for student though!