Institute News Main Headline

IFTM Students Complement Recent Open Day Event with Technology

中文摘要 / Summary in Chinese

A team of two IFTM students, Ethel and Sonia, who are IFTM Hotel Management Year One and Tourism Event Management Year Two students respectively, employed Augmented Reality (AR) technology to enhance the overall experiences at the Open Day held on 23 April 2023. Led by Mr. Joe Lam, this project, referred to as ARX (Augmented Reality eXperience), contains three ideas: pocket-sized iRetail Lab; a quick tour of future campus life at IFTM; and a virtual backdrop for photo taking moments. Mr. Joe Lam is a lecturer in Information Technology at IFTM and teaches Digital Competence courses.

iRetail Lab is a retail space located at the East Asia Hall of the IFTM Taipa Campus for students to polish their skills for future real-life retail and marketing scenarios. It is also a practical venue for the Tourism Retail and Marketing Management degree programme students. The first AR idea is to create a pocket-sized iRetail Lab for promotional purpose.

Provided by Ethel, the second AR idea allows visitors to experience the highlights of studying at IFTM – featuring the institute’s recognitions, admission, students’ campus life, and the opportunities to exchange around the world – in a digitally immersive manner.

Named “Smile Time” and suggested by Sonia, the third AR idea is about having a virtual backdrop allowing visitors to take pictures with IFTM’s Open Day poster and mascots – the IFTM buddies – anytime, anywhere.  

Another technology students experimented is the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. NFC facilitates communications between two devices by literally “putting them together”. Mobile payment methods requiring tapping a mobile device against at payment console is a popular example of NFC usage.

Are you interested in AR technology? For those who wants to transform ideas into AR, there is good news. Joe commented, “In fact, AR technology is well-developed these days. It is possible to build AR applications without complex IT skills and every student should try.” “Also, the experience of launching AR with NFC on mobile is more preferable than the same approach with QR code,” Joe added.

Speaking of the project, “Visitors are surprised by our smart use of technologies from a non-technical perspective,” commented by Sonia after the event. Ethel also pointed out that “it is crucial to plan for the best strategy to balance visitor’s interest and the technology’s operating time.” The result of this project is a good sign that our students are good at applying technologies. Joe concluded, “Thanks to our city’s 5G infrastructure, students could apply more technologies to studying now. AR is one of those technologies certainly.”

Experience the three AR works at the Open Day here: http://bit.ly/m/iftmod23

Ethel (center) and Sonia (left) shared the AR demos with visitors during IFTM Open Day 2023.

To encourage learning, the team decided to open the source files under CC (Creative Commons) license. We hope this could trigger more ideas!

ARX © 2023 by IFTM ARtists is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Everyone is welcome to download and remix the work for AR learning purposes. The download password is “iftm2023” (without quotation marks). To open the files, Adobe Aero is required. For further inquiries, please get in touch with Mr. Joe Lam (joe@iftm.edu.mo).

Students who enrolled in ICT1002 Digital Competence I will learn more about the principles and technical skills in Digital Competence Framework (DigComp).

President’s Corner

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