D3.6 Report on the standardization landscape and applicable standards

The standards and expectations for educational attainment has risen globally although the diversification of the IT infrastructure of the public educational systems has declined and has not followed the trends of the XR advancements. The young population has advanced aspirations and expectations in terms of IT support in schools, which is essential to achieve their goals for educational attainment and their goals for learning. One of the critical issues around the articulation of the increasingly technological “demands” is the lack of awareness of the stakeholders of the standards around the new technologies.

Deliverable D3.6 “Report on Standardization landscape and applicable standards” (M26) is the deliverable for Task 3.4 Standardization landscape and applicable standards within WP3 (Interactive Augmented Reality Toolkit). The main objective of this task is to facilitate the awareness of existing standards in the market within the consortium and utilize the plans for further standardization activities. The information within this deliverable is the background work for information towards the development within the rest of the WPs to ensure the interoperability and compatibility with existing standards in terms of the following tasks:

• Three-dimensional (3D) Augmented Reality (AR) Objects’ creation.

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards for AR Objects’ content ratings and descriptors.

• IEEE Standard for AR learning experience models.

This document is a guide for the ARETE partners on information about the context and purpose of utilizing existing standards related to Augmented Reality Enhanced Teaching Experience (ARETE) project. A high-level overview of standardization activities in Augmented Reality (and Extended Reality (XR)) within educational systems is paramount before presenting the ARETE standardization plan, based on general standardization processes in Europe and Internationally. The activities on standardization have been initiated within the consortium at an early stage to highlight the importance of compliance and interoperability and is ongoing within the authoring toolkit development activities (WP3) with an aim to make an impact visible internationally at the end of the project.

Nowadays, the impact of Augmented Reality (AR) in the educational systems has been shown to be effective in various aspects. Interoperability facilitates the work of an AR educational system programmer in terms of authoring, publishing, and integration. In addition, interoperability could benefit users in subjects of discovery, sharing and consuming. Although there is a plethora of learning object metadata standards such as IEEE- Learning Object Metadata (LOM), Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) and DUBLIN CORE, there is lack of standards in terms of interoperability specification and AR educational systems’ support. Augmented Reality Learning Experience Model (ARLEM) is an IEEE Computer Society open metadata standard that supports interoperability and can additionally support augmented reality education systems.