Page 5 - MAVR Newsletter Volume 2, Issue 1 (April 2018)

2.​ ​VR App for Cool Teachers: Around the World with Google

Expeditions
by Mehrasa Alizadeh

Google Expeditions is a VR platform designed for education. Using Expeditions, you
can take your students to virtual trips all over the world, to mountains, oceans, outer
space, inside the human body, museums, and festivals only to name a few, without
leaving your physical space. At the time of its release, there were about 500 expeditions
available and so many are still being developed. The expeditions consist of 360° degree
photos annotated with descriptions and marked with specific points of interest called
“spaces”. What makes the expeditions even more engaging is that they are not just
tours to majestic places like Mount Everest or Mars. The app can take you and your
students to places you may not be able to get to due to lack of time, geographic

distance, and safety issues. For instance, you can only use news articles and videos to
explain to students what happened at a nuclear disaster site like Fukushima, but with
Expeditions, you can take your students to the heart of the disaster to give them a new
experience beyond merely reading texts or watching videos.

In order to set up Google Expeditions, all you need is a tablet for the teacher,
smartphones for the students, VR goggles such as Google Cardboard, and a router that
allows the app to run over its wireless local network. You might now be thinking that
your school or university does not have a stable Wi-Fi connection to download all those
heavy assets simultaneously on all devices. No problem! The developers have already
taken care of it by making the virtual tours downloadable on the teacher’s device. That
device then operates as a local server for each of the connected student devices

(Figure 1).

Figure 1. ​Teacher and
student devices
connected within a local

Google Expeditions
network. Screenshot
from ​VR in the
classroom: Early
lessons learned from
Google Expeditions
(32’:06”)

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