Merge Cube as a New Teaching Tool for Augmented Reality

Abstract

Due to the massive popularity of smartphones among people of all ages, Augmented Reality is becoming a commonly available technology for which we do not need to have special equipment, just an ordinary cheap smartphone with a camera. In this paper, we will deal with the use of Augmented Reality in education through the popular Merge cube, which has been enjoying increasing popularity in the educational process since 2017. In our article, we focus on the comparison of existing applications with the support of the Merge cube and the possibilities of it‘s use in education. We pay the main attention to the creation of our own educational application, which consists of five independent parts (three educational parts, like the solar system, world monuments, and marine animals, and two entertainment parts with the possibility of setting the difficulty, respectively-game type, like Pexeso and the 3D Labyrinth). Application development was carried out in the Unity 3D environment for mobile operating system Android. The application is mainly intended for hospitalized children, but it was tested due to pandemic restrictions among 134 children in regular primary and secondary schools. The main advantage of our application compared to other applications is that it is free, contains several educational areas and also that we can modify the content - it is open source.