With the astronomical rise in popularity of virtual reality in education, it’s important to make available tools for students to create virtual reality content as well as consuming it. So while you get ready to send your students off on Expeditions to amazing new worlds and experiences, have ways for them to make their own waiting when they return.
Let’s look at a couple ways students can create VR content.
What’s VR?
VR stands for virtual reality: immersive multimedia content that attempts to replace conventional reality. The most well-known example is Google Expeditions. To view an Expedition, you put your phone inside a cardboard “viewer” (nearly identical to the old View-masters), then play a 360-degree video. The cardboard viewer shows the video stereoscope-style.
Inside the Expedition, students experience high-resolution 360-degree videos that showcase places they likely have never had a chance to visit first-hand. Check out this footage, below from inside an underwater Expedition:
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Once you have the 360-photo, you can slip your phone or tablet into a Cardboard-style viewer for a more immersive experience.
Two cautions about Thinglink’s VR tool: it’s currently only available with the Teacher plan (read: costs $) and the tool itself is very particular about the size of your panoramic photo. It must be aspect ratio 2:1 and maximum resolution 5376 x 2688 pixels. The measurements are super-exacting, and you can’t be off by even a single pixel.
Or with Google Street View’s “photospheres”:
ISTE created this tutorial for using the Google Street View app to create “photospheres”, their terms for 360-degree photos.
Basically, the app allows students to choose a location in the world, zoom there, then they move their phones around (following the app’s prompts) to take a variety of photos of the location. The app then stitches them all together into one 360-degree panorama. Pop the phone back in a Cardboard viewer and voilà: instant virtual reality!
Shiny? Yes. Immersive? Kind of.
For us, Thinglink has the edge in photo production because students can add links to video and audio to the image. They can create their own video, audio, still or written reflections to the image as well.
Have you created virtual reality materials with your students?
*There are more in-depth ways for students to create virtual reality materials — namely by involving the Unity game engine and doing a little coding — but if you’re looking for quick and easy ways to start your students on the VR creation road, these should do the trick.
Source: TIIE