Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, the world is in the midst of a digital revolution. Artificial intelligence programs are growing at a rapid rate, with generative artificial intelligence programs like Midjourney and sophisticated chatbots like ChatGPT already becoming part of everyday experience for people across the world, at school, at work and in daily life.
As generative AI develops at blistering speed, content creation becomes commoditized and publishers risk losing competitive advantage. The digital sphere is poised to be flooded with easy to produce content that is optimized for high engagement, able to drive traffic and clicks. As the amount of content grows exponentially, finding reliable information becomes increasingly challenging – resulting in a necessity for curated content.
AI advancement is already causing a stir within the publishing industry, as we’ve witnessed earlier this year when the shares of Chegg, a company providing online study guides, dropped by half following a quote by its CEO in the Financial Times article, stating that the rapid growth of ChatGPT and student interest in it is impacting their customer growth rate.
So what can the publishing industry do to keep up with the inevitable changes the advent of AI has brought?
In order to remain at the cutting edge of advancement, publishers need to take a twofold approach to what they are offering students – one involves facilitating curated content to maintain relevance and reliability of educational material. The other calls for a move beyond the text, into alternative methods of presenting educational content to trigger student engagement.
The only mode of dealing with the ever-changing technology is to engage with it. Industry leaders in the field, who lead with their expertise within pedagogy and education cannot afford to shy away from technological advancements and fear their consequences. Instead, they can see this as an opportunity. It is precisely the experts within a given discipline who ought to utilize their position and take responsibility for learning the development of technology.
How?
By taking the learning beyond the text and the very pages of physical books to more accessible, adaptive, individual learning experiences by bringing learning to life through the use of augmented reality.
Students have diverse learning preferences, and multimedia content can cater to a wide range of learning styles. Multimedia content adds an interactive and dynamic dimension to textbooks, capturing students' attention and keeping them engaged throughout their learning journey. It breaks the monotony of text-heavy pages, making the material more visually appealing and captivating.
In a recent systematic literature review paper, researchers have found that the use of multimedia fosters curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking skills, as students are encouraged to explore and interact with the content actively.
When learning becomes engaging and entertaining, students are likely to develop a positive attitude towards education. Recent research has supported the conclusion that, by simplifying complex ideas and presenting them in a visually accessible format, 3D content can help enhance students' interaction, performance, and satisfaction compared with the game-based and book-based learning methods.
The biggest hurdle of course, is cost and complexity of 3D models used for AR content. Creating 3D content of high quality and distributing it to students is time, labor and cost intensive.
That’s why here at Ludenso, we’re building a platform that provides subject matter experts with an opportunity to curate multimedia content that is coupled with their educational books.
We hope that offering a multimedia platform that allows students and educators to explore the curriculum through audio, video, and 3D that enriches the already existing high quality text material will lead to a more well-rounded experience for students.
Even though it is in its early stages, creating 3D models with generative AI offer a promising future for AR in education. Much like we are now able to give a text prompt to an AI program and get a 2D picture in return, we’re starting to see the early possibilities of doing the same within 3D.
Seeing how rapidly AI has developed within 2D, it is reasonable to assume that its application within 3D is just around the corner. This offers a chance for educators to seize this opportunity and establish early authority within the field, by applying their expertise to this growing field.
The models that currently are showing the most potential start with a prompt from the user, much like one would prompt a platform like Midjourney today in order to render a 2D image via AI. The prompt is used to first generate 2D images via text to image generators like stable diffusion, Dall-E or Midjourney. These images are then used to train AI to generate a 360 “video” of a 3D object. This video is called NeRF which in turn can be used to create a 3D model.
Today the generation of 3D models uses existing pretrained 2D image generators for each new 3D model. This means that improvements to the models affect how good new 3D models can be made and we have seen a recent explosion in quality from image generators like Midjourney.
Larger improvements are probably pending the cessation of reliance on 2D generators to render 3D models. Witnessing how the quality of 2D image generators improved from rudimentary to astonishing over the past few years, the same thing happening to 3D model generation can happen very quickly.
Thanks to research done by Google and Nvidia, we’re already seeing promising results in text to 3D model synthesis through pretrained diffusion models, providing for new modes of 3D model synthesis. In addition, researchers from Open AI recently released a paper showcasing an entirely new technique for generating 3d models.
Here at Ludenso, we are excited to empower learners through AR, and drive this change that is inevitable. Generative content is here to stay, and together we can harness its power to use it to scale AR-enriched content, ensuring publishers’ position as the curators of high quality knowledge.
Amazing, book a 20 min call by filling out the form on our Request Demo page. We’re happy to demo the technology and discuss collaboration opportunities. Looking forward to hearing from you!
