Pseudo-holographic Displays as Teaching Tools in Mathematics

Abstract

Due to the fact that the abstract mathematical notions are often hard to grasp by students, without linking them to a specific physical representation or correlate them with regular facts, our team came up with the idea to create and implement a set of interactive teaching tool packages (ITTPs) to help them overcome such issues. The ITTPs consist of theoretical modules and applications in the framework of a Hungarian - Romanian cross-border project, developed with the aid of existing open source software and technologies. The focus of the Romanian team was on basic elements of linear algebra and analytic geometry, showcased using an auto-stereoscopic display for the purpose of image visualization. This paper presents an overview of similar technologies and the applications developed for representing pseudo-holographic images of geometric objects, namely vectors, straight lines, planes and conics. One of the developed packages was written using web technologies in order to make the applications available on mobile devices, as well as to eliminate the need to install any additional software.