An EPC-based middleware enabling reusable and flexible mixed reality educational experiences

The world of education is changing substantially to satisfy new needs requested both from teachers and students. A very important role in this changing process is played by emerging hi-technologies, such as mobile phones, tablet computers, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE), and auto-identification (Auto-ID) solutions (e.g. QR code, RFID, NFC). Several attempts to renovate traditional classrooms to enable Mixed Reality (MR) educational experiences are already reported in the literature. Nevertheless, they often lack a middleware able to ease the smart classroom management. This failure is due to poor flexibility in the means of easiness of new technologies configuration and educational methods configurations. In this paper, we present an educational MR middleware based on the EPCglobal standard. The proposed middleware is easy in Auto-ID and CVE technologies configuration; furthermore, it is able to support a competition among different classes of students or schools, by leveraging the EPC Information Services for extracting times and scores. We report also on an experience we made configuring the proposed middleware for a MR educational format called “TIWE Linguistico,” highlighting main benefits obtained considering an Italian high school for strengthening the English language mastery.