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This year the digital learning group attended Bett at ExCel London in January. Bett is the largest EdTech show in the UK, featuring a wide array of education technology to explore and seminars to learn from. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the highlights from Bett.

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Google Arts & Culture is an online platform that allows you to view high-resolution images of artworks from around the world.



The Google Arts & Culture app hosts content from over 1200 museums and archives from across the world with tens of thousands of individual pieces of content including 360 degree videos of places and events, street views of locations like the Taj Mahal or Machu Pichu, or even inside views of the Palace of Versailles for example.

You can look for historical street art or narrow down your search by a specific colour or time.

The Chrome Extension shows you a new piece of art each time you create a new tab in Chrome.

Now with VR and AR, you can walk around museums and other amazing buildings from around the world.

The mobile device app allows you to use VR/AR to view art in a new way, some of the features are listed below along with video examples of how to use them:

  • Art Selfie
    • Take a quick selfie and the app will compare it with thousands of pieces of art from throughout history to find someone who looks like you.
  • Colour Palette
    • Take a photo of an item nearby then the app will search for more art with the same colours, perfect if creating a moodboard based on a specific colour.
  • Pocket Gallery
    • Use AR to walk round already created art exhibits without having to leave the room.
  • Art Projector
    • Use AR to place paintings and artwork infront of you so you can see the true scale of the pieces.

Art Selfie

Colour Palette

What is VR, AR and Google Cardboard?

Pocket Gallery

Art Projector

What is VR?

VR

In simple terms, Virtual Reality (VR) is a complete, immersive experience that is separate to the physical world. For this, you would need VR devices such as HTV Vive, Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard.

This quick video from Google demonstates an example of how you could use VR in a lesson, granted it is for a younger audience but it’s just an idea to aid understanding.

What is AR?

AR

Augmented Reality (AR) simply adds a digital element to a live view, most often by using the camera on your phone. A good example of AR is the lenses in Snapchat or the Pokemon Go smartphone game. The video here shows an example of the AR of Google Expeditions.

This video from Google shows a couple of different examples of AR in the classroom, watching a volcano erupt or looking at an asteroid belt.

Google Cardboard

Whilst some VR devices are quite expensive, you’ll see that Google Cardboard is very low cost. The standard Google Cardboard device is currently £11.40 because you use the Google Expeditions or Google Cardboard apps on your smartphone and place your smartphone into the Cardboard device as a viewer. Whereas a device like an Oculus Rift, which has a screen and all the tech packaged inside the viewer, will set you back around £400 each.

If you picked a Google Cardboard viewer for around £5, you could kit out 3 classrooms with viewers for the price of a single Oculus Rift device.

These devices allow you to position your smartphone in the unit to work as the VR screen. This is perfect for a classroom environment, especially since almost everyone has a smartphone these days. This video we made shows just how quick and easy it is to add a smartphone to the viewer.

CoSpaces EDU lets students build their own 3D creations, animate them with code and explore them in Virtual or Augmented Reality.



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Google Expeditions brings lessons to life using AR and VR straight from a mobile device.



Google Expeditions is an immersive education app that allows teachers and students to explore the world through over 1000 virtual-reality (VR) and 100 augmented-reality (AR) tours. You can swim with sharks, visit outer space, and more without leaving the classroom, with or without a VR device such as Google Cardboard.

Built for the classroom and small group use, Google Expeditions allows a teacher acting as a “guide” to lead classroom-sized groups of “explorers” through collections of 360° and 3D images while pointing out interesting sights along the way.

Expeditions can be installed to Android and iOS devices.

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