“Wearing Matisse’s Hat: Role Playing In an Online Art History Course Using Augmented Reality”

By Joey Azoulai

Concept Overview

A role playing game for undergraduate students in an art history class that helps increase
collaboration while teaching key concepts in contemporary and modern art. The role playing
game is facilitated by “live filters,” i.e. masks, costumes, backgrounds, effects, and props that
are based on key works or schools of modern and contemporary art. These artifacts would be
generated using facial recognition technology and augmented reality using the tool SparkAR.

Problem

In the beginning of an online course, learners have the challenge of creating relationships with
other students in order to facilitate collaboration and learning. However, there are several
barriers to developing such relationships including the physical distance, social anxieties, and
minimum contact time. In this project, I decided to explore the concept of playfulness as a way
to facilitate collaboration by bonding participants and creating a safe space for learning. This
project was partially inspired by a comment that Colin made in class about gamification being
less about arbitrary incentives and more about ​play​ in the true sense of playfulness.

Concept Description

In this first week of the online course, ​History of Modern and Contemporary Art​ students join a
synchronous video conference while disguised as famous paintings from the 20th and 21st
centuries. The disguises are not physical costumes, they are “live filters.” In other words, the
disguises are augmented reality (AR) objects that track to the live video of the learner. The AR
objects would be based on key works of art of schools of modern and contemporary art.

Augmented Reality Tools

One of the reasons Snapchat became popular was because of the filters that augmented masks
and costumes on people’s faces when they took a selfie. With the release of the iPhone X,
Apple popularized filters that could be augmented live during synchronous video conferencing,
in this case using the app FaceTime. Recently, Facebook released a tool called SparkAR that
affords users the ability to create their own filters to post on social media, no longer having to
rely on canned options.
Modern Art Inspiration

For this project, I would use Spark AR to create a library of live filters based on modern and
contemorary art. Specifically, learners could wear the hat from Matisse’s ​Woman in a Hat​ or
rearrange their own facial features in the style of Cubism. Learners could “wear” these
augmented costumes in synchronous and asynchronous communication such as video
messages. These augmented costumes in different art styles could become the basis of various
learning games. For example, learners could play a guessing game about which school inspired
a chosen filter and the person who chose the filter could reveal the correct answer.

Fauvism Cubism Surrealism Abstract

 Abstract
Expressionism Expressionist Pop Art Neo expressionism

Learning Goals

Students will be able to...

● Differentiate between eight modern art styles when presented with a gallery of examples
by matching drawing connections between schools of art and their aesthetic attributes.

● Determine the correct artist and title when presented with a live filter inspired by a
specific work of art.

● Create a work of art based on a school of modern and contemporary art by creating a
custom live filter derived from a key work of art in that style.

Supporting Theory

● Play - ​According to Vygotsky, “this strict subordination to rules is quite impossible in life,
but in play it does become possible (Vygotsky, p.102, 1980).” This design solution
attempts to use play to afford learners that ability to ​become​ the art they are studying. In
this way, learners are playing with each other and playing with the art itself, which could
contribute to a more intimate dialogue in both cases.

● Roles​ - Each student in the course would select or be assigned a school of art. This
assignment gives them the “role” of an expert in that particular style. They will share this
expertise by “wearing” an artifact of that art style and leading a game with other
students. This approach leverages the theory that groups with role assignments have
increased levels of communication than groups with out (Rose 2004).

● Anonymity - ​Learners would experience this role playing activity in the first session of
the course, before they have gotten to know their peers. Aided by the addition of the live
filters, the learners remain even more anonymous, freeing themselves from their actual
 identities, which can increase equity and participation rates (Chester & Gwynne 1998).
The freeing of social identity means that the conversation can focused exclusively on the
knowledge acquisition (Lowenthal 2010).

● Student presence - ​The students themselves become the learning material through the
use of live filters, which may increase the sense of presence the students have of each
other. Increased student presence between students can increase student satisfaction
(Garrison & Cleveland-Innes 2005).

Sources

Andrea Chester, Gillian Gwynne, Online Teaching: Encouraging Collaboration through

Anonymity, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 4, Issue 2, 1 December
1998, JCMC424

Borup, J., West, R. E., & Graham, C. R. (2012). Improving online social presence through
asynchronous video. ​The Internet and Higher Education​, ​15(​ 3), 195-203.

D. Randy Garrison & Martha Cleveland-Innes (2005) Facilitating Cognitive Presence in Online
Learning: Interaction Is Not Enough, The American Journal of DistanceEducation, 19:3, 133-148

Lowenthal, P. R. (2010). Social presence. In ​Social computing: Concepts, methodologies, tools,

and applications​ (pp. 129-136). IGI Global.

Rose, M. A. (2004). Comparing productive online dialogue in two group styles: Cooperative and
collaborative. ​The American Journal of Distance Education​, ​18(​ 2), 73-88.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). ​Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes​.

Harvard university press.