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Google brings AR tours to its Expeditions field trip app
Last year, Google announced that it was working on bringing AR to its Expeditions platform and since then, it has been testing AR expeditions with around one million students. Today, the company has made those AR tours available to everyone, adding around 100 of them to the Expeditions app. Now anyone can check out the planets of our solar system, Leonardo Da Vinci's inventions, the skeletal system, art and a number of other AR tours with their phone. "AR takes the abstract and makes it concrete to the students," California teacher Darin Nakakihara said in a statement. "We wouldn't be able to see a heart right on the desk, what it looks like when beating and the blood circulating."
Google makes it easy to create your own VR tours
With Google Expeditions, you can take tours of ancient sites like Machu Picchu, visit attractions like the Burj Khalifa or even take a trip to the International Space Station and now Google is making it easier to create tours yourself. With a new platform called Tour Creator, anyone can now put together a VR tour of whatever they'd like using their own 360-degree photos and Google Street View images. "The tool is designed to let you produce professional-level VR content without a steep learning curve," says Google.
Lenovo’s VR Classroom kits come with Daydream headsets
Lenovo will soon release its VR Classroom setup, which will let teachers guide their students through virtual field trips. Each kit comes with the first standalone Daydream VR headset, Lenovo's Mirage Solo with Daydream, which arrives preloaded with over 700 Google Expeditions VR field trips as well as three exclusive Jane Goodall "Wild Immersion" videos. The VR field trips allow classrooms to explore the world and in order to help facilitate the learning experience, the videos include stopping points during which teachers can add more information or answer questions as well as talking points for teachers. Additionally, online lesson plans will be available to assist teachers in getting the most from the kit.
Take a VR trip with Google Expeditions all by yourself
In 2015, Google launched a pilot program of its Expeditions software that let teachers take their students on VR explorations of various sites around the world. A few months later, it released a beta version of its Expeditions app for certain schools to try out, which was then released for anyone to use in June of last year. Today, Google announced that its now releasing a solo mode for the app that makes it easier for users to take tours outside of a classroom setting.
Google turns 'Hamilton' hype into a VR history lesson
We're all a bit more versed in American history these days, thanks in great part to playwright and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda and his award-winning hip-hop-infused musical, Hamilton. The Hamilton Education Program will bring 5,000 disadvantaged students from Title I schools in New York and the Bay Area to see the musical today as the culmination of a six-week curriculum to learn more about the era of our founding fathers. To support the project, the Gilder Lehrman Institute (one partner of the program) is launching six new virtual reality tours on Google Expeditions.
NASA highlights women in STEM with a virtual field trip
NASA and Google Expeditions are celebrating International Women's Day with a series of virtual field trips highlighting the careers of seven women and their contributions to America's space program. The tours are part of the Modern Figures program, which continues the conversation started by the film Hidden Figures, and allow viewers to step into a 100,000 square-foot aircraft hangar, a simulated Martian landscape, a space flight operations facility and other locations where NASA's women engineers, scientists and directors work towards the next milestone in space exploration.
Google offers its Cardboard-powered VR field trips to schools for free
Google detailed its Expeditions project back at I/O, and now the company is looking to get schools more involved. To do just that, Mountain View will offer schools the VR field trip kits for free. The New York Times reports that Google is handing out the Expeditions package at no cost to help push the effort ahead. Each kit contains Cardboard VR headsets and ASUS phones for the students alongside an app for teachers that controls the virtual trips. And as you might expect, they're able to pause the action to ask questions as needed. Google isn't ruling out charging for the gear at some point, though, if it's able to make the price affordable enough for educators.
