Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Network

Back at ISTE in June, Google’s expo hall space was flooded with educators hoping to try on a Google Expeditions headset--a virtual reality experience made out of a smartphone and Google Cardboard that takes the viewer to the likes of the Great Wall of China, Mars and underwater at the Great Barrier Reef. But there’s a key problem with implementing Google Expeditions in the classroom--no smartphone, no dice.

But now, Google hopes to fix that with the launch of the Expeditions Pioneer Program pilot.

Starting today, Google will provide “kits” to select teachers that includes everything a classroom needs to venture out on Google Expeditions. The kit includes:

Virtual Reality is about to find it’s way into schools and classrooms with a new layer of interactivity from ThingLink! ThingLink VR will allow educators to create an affordable interactive learning environment to immerse students in learning experiences like never before.

ThingLink is evolving from image and video annotation to 360 content, which gives educators a larger canvas to create virtual learning experiences. 

"Cardboard puts virtual reality on your iPhone. The Google Cardboard app helps you set up a Cardboard viewer and includes a few experiences to get you started:

     * Explorer: Explore exciting environments.

     * Exhibit: View 3D objects from a museum collection.

     * Urban Hike: Take a hike through iconic cities around the world.

     * Kaleidoscope: Enjoy a fun stereoscopic take on the old classic."

by Ching-Fu Lan

"ARIS (Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling) is an open-source platform that enables users to create location-based mobile games and interactive stories. With mobile devices, GPS technology, or QR codes, ARIS players can navigate in augmented reality worlds where virtual characters and objects are linked to physical places and facilitate gaming and learning activities. Its game editor allows educators to create interactive learning activities on various topics and is useful for students to learn basic game design concepts such as goals, rules, and challenges."

by Benjamin Herold

"In March, the social-media giant Facebook paid a whopping $2 billion to acquire Oculus VR, the Irvine, Calif.-based startup behind a new virtual-reality headset known as the Oculus Rift. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg described Oculus' device as a "new communications platform," akin to personal computers and mobile devices, that could have similarly far-reaching implications for gaming, entertainment, social networking, and classroom learning.

"Potential educational applications include virtual field trips, immersive digital learning games and simulations, and therapeutic experiences for students with special needs.

"But not everyone is buying the hype. Previous virtual-reality technologies got a lot of attention in the 1990s, and again in the early 2000s, before mostly falling flat, and public schools in the United States are not exactly known as hotbeds for nurturing emerging technologies.

"Virtual reality is super-cool, but schools are still struggling with the blocking and tackling of getting basic digital technologies in classrooms," said Trace A. Urdan, a senior analyst for Wells Fargo Securities in San Francisco who tracks digital learning investment trends."

by Carmen Jones

"Recent research focuses on gamification for students, but what about gamification for pre-service and in-service teachers? Quest2Teach aims to help future educators bridge theory and practice within instructor-led courses in an online environment. In this game, which uses a "small game" (i.e., containable and personalized) framework, teachers develop an avatar that they use to engage in learning virtually across semesters. The 3D, virtual reality platform allows teachers to "learn through doing," experimenting, and practicing before entering a real classroom environment. Quest2Teach, in the spirit of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, sees experiential learning as essential to education, whether the learner is a teacher or student."

Once you try virtual reality, even despite some technical and visual drawbacks, you can easily imagine that watching short videos, playing games or interacting with friends would be fun, immersive and transporting. It’s truly a new form of entertainment — once there’s something to watch.

And content is coming. This week’s Sundance Film Festival, for example, featured a slate of virtual reality films that included immersive news programming from Vice, and a short companion film to the movie “Wild,” created by Fox Searchlight Pictures, that lets viewers stand on the trail alongside the movie’s star, Reese Witherspoon. And 8,000 Google Cardboard headsets were handed out so festivalgoers could watch.

Several companies are building virtual worlds that live inside of VR. The dream: Disrupting everything about the real world.

“Augmented Reality (AR) allows teachers and students to extend the physical world with a virtual overlay. Whether you have iPad, Android, or a smartphone, scanning a trigger in the physical world with an AR app allows a new layer of information to appear. This information could be a link to a web site, a video, …”

Educators and students alike are seeking an ever-expanding immersive landscape, where students engage with teachers and each other in transformative experiences through a wide spectrum of interactive resources. In this educational reality, VR has a definitive place of value.

Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are making some huge leaps into the educational landscape transforming the way teaching and learning are taking place. Educators and teachers are increasingly adopting AR technologies in their classrooms. As extensions of the physical world,  AR technologies amplify its dimensions and bring life to its static constituents. There are a variety of ways you can use AR in your class. For instance, you can use them to take your students into virtual field trips, visit world museums, animate and enrich textbook content and many more.

There's something for every educator to learn from these nine articles – all written by ISTE members – that offer standards-aligned ed tech ideas on topics as diverse as flipped learning, virtual reality and digital citizenship.

by Amanda Green

"Virtual reality therapies are increasingly proving successful in a number of settings. As the virtual reality platforms and interfaces improve, we will start to see more of the following:

"1. Reducing pain

Pain is partly psychological in nature, which means that distractions can help relieve pain. Listening to music, for example, is one distraction that’s able to help reduce pain. Virtual reality is another distraction that has proven to reduce pain substantially.

"One example is in the care of burn victims, who often have to suffer through a great deal of pain. The virtual reality game SnowWorld, for example, has been used to help children and wounded veterans reduce perceived pain, reduce need for anesthesia, and improve healing and mobility."

by Melissa Hogenboom

"Scientists have now found that...ingrained racial bias was reduced when participants were immersed in a virtual body of a different race.

"To test their implicit racism, a team led by Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona gave participants what's called an implicit association test several days before the experiment. They were given the same test again after their experience in virtual reality.

"It was only the participants who had been placed in a dark virtual body that showed this decrease."

by Laura Devaney

"Five technologies are reaching maximum impact and are about to transform education, changing just about everything, according to educational futurist Jason Ohler.

"Speaking during the International Society for Technology in Education’s virtual conference on Feb. 13, Ohler noted that five trends–big data, augmented reality, the semantic web, extreme bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and transmedia storytelling–will change teaching and learning in the very near future."

by Vindu Goel

"Virtual reality is virtually here — although its first incarnation will come with short battery life, images that do not quite track eye movements and a tendency to induce motion sickness.

"In the next few months, Samsung intends to release the Gear VR, a headset that combines software from the virtual-reality pioneer Oculus VR and Samsung’s coming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone to create a portable virtual reality experience.

"And within the next year or so, personal computer users will probably be able to buy a more powerful headset from Oculus itself that will allow them to plunge more deeply into three-dimensional virtual worlds, from outer space to the Egyptian pyramids.

"Oculus showed off the latest versions of both devices over the weekend to developers in Los Angeles. Two things were clear: Serious technical challenges remain, but Oculus is closer than any other company to creating a product consumers can use to explore computer-generated environments that seem so real that you almost forget they are fake."

by Bryan Bishop

"You’ll have to excuse me. I’m going to sound a little excited now.

"Earlier today Oculus announced Story Studio, its in-house production team dedicated to producing virtual reality movies. We’ve been seeing VR narrative experiences for years at this point, and while they’ve been getting more and more impressive, they’ve still been iterative steps forward. Despite how much we’ve all wanted to it to happen, nothing has stood up, raised its hands, and shouted "I’m the project that proves this crazy thing could actually work."

"I just watched Lost, the first short from Story Studio. That stand up and shout moment? It’s arrived."

Google has seen the future, and it is littered with cardboard boxes.

At its Google I/O developer conference here on Thursday, the search giant announced several programs that aim to put its virtual reality viewer, called Cardboard, at the center of a growing online world in which people can use their smartphone and YouTube to watch videos rendered in 3-D.