Every now and again, I’m blown away by the imaginative apps I see in the iOS App Store, as did this one: Ghost Guitar.

The app utilizes the iPhone or iPad 2’s front-facing camera to track your hands. You strum with your right hand and fret chords with the left. Quite a simple mechanic that has been exceedingly well-implemented. The use of augmented reality as an interface has mostly been gimmicky.

I ran into this interesting infographic this morning about Augmented Reality marketing today. While it’s not completely relevant to eLearning or learning in general, it’s interesting to see that AR is making rapid strides in marketing. Also, the figures seem to suggest that while it’s gimmicky, it improves engagement and gets individuals to spend more time on those website that use AR.

Each week sees us sharing interesting articles (including news, reports, statistics etc.) from various spheres of learning and technology on varied social networking platforms. While many of you follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we do realize that keeping a track of all the tweets/ posts, given the high proliferation and dynamic nature of information, is difficult, to say the least. Hence, to ensure that you do not miss out on all the great links we share and also with a view to building a knowledge repository, every week, we shall be publishing a quick summary post of our best shared material from the week before. Read it, share it or bookmark it.

With 29 new posts, April has been the most active month on our blog. And we do realize that some of you would want to get a quick summary post at the end of the month that lists which ones were hot. So here’s the first of our monthly roundup posts that we intend to put up every month now.

We talked on various topics in April – from LMS to Augmented Reality, from Games to AS 3.0 Resources.

We have been experimenting with development of Augmented Reality [AR] applications for some time now. Earlier this week we released the first Indian Layar app called Pune Layar and had earlier created a simple Car Game using FLARToolkit. While developing these applications we considered many alternative tools & technologies to develop such applications for learning. Here I share some of them that may be useful for our readers if they too wish to experiment with AR.

We believe Layar, the AR browser can have a significant role to play in mobile learning. We have been playing with Layar for a some weeks now and yesterday we released a layer for Pune city. This is our first public layer which would be useful for the public as well as (hopefully) provide us valuable feedback about Layar development.

Below I share my development experience of creating the Pune Layar.

Today, Upside Learning is thrilled to announce that we are augmenting reality in Pune, with a layer that’ll let you find significant landmarks in and around the city. If you have an iPhone or Android Phone and have the augmented reality browser Layar installed you can access this layer now.

We’ve been experimenting with Augmented Reality and Virtuality, we posted about that earlier here. We found Layar really interesting and wanted to develop a layer just to see how it works and to understand what the user experience is like.

This month’s Big Question on Learning Circuits Blog seeks to understand how we are keeping up with the increasingly complex tools and technologies landscape.

I reflect on this question from an organization perspective as opposed to an individual’s perspective. Here’s what we are doing in our organization:

1. Do Serious Games Work? Results from Three Studies
Some studies help answer some of the questions now surrounding serious games-or games whose primary purpose is something other than entertainment, such as military training, education, physical therapy-and determine the relationship between the use of video games and learning as measured on standardized tests. More research is needed, but these findings provide some answers to both skeptics and supporters.

I have great respect for Apple as an organization particularly because I use an iPhone and I think the iPhone has definitely become one of those game-changers in the smartphone world and by a large margin.

I was looking forward to the Apple iPad even more so as we have been doing good stuff on mobile learning and putting up applications and tools on iPhone as pilots and on a trial basis. The iPad was supposed to be better and bigger than the iPhone, closer to a computer and much more than just a phone.

The Horizon 2010 report has been published and is available for download. It’s definitely worth a read; lots of interesting trends that will affect the way we live and learn.

I found it interesting that the report points to mobile computing and open content as being on the near-term horizon, within the next 12 months. To follow after on the horizon are electronic books and augmented reality.