Google wants to take students around the world and beyond with Expeditions

By Will Fulton May 29, 2015

This story is part of our complete Google I/O coverage

Expeditions: Take your students to places a school can't

Short of the Magic School Bus, class field trips are a logistically-complicated affair, and generally limited to places within easy driving distance of the school. One of the long-promised goals of virtual reality is to enable students to explore the whole universe without leaving the classroom’s confines. Google has now taken tangible steps to make that possibility available to students with the announcement of Expeditions at I/O 2015.

Expeditions comes as a complete kit with everything that a teacher needs to take their entire classroom on a magical VR fieldtrip. Every student gets a Cardboard headset and accompanying phone to use with it. The teacher gets a tablet from which to orchestrate the adventure. All of the phones and tablet come already synced up for ease of use.

Hundreds of classrooms around the world have already been using Expeditions for the last few months, to rave reviews. Students studying Romeo and Juliet have been able to see the streets of fair Verona, where we lay our scene. Aspiring marine biologists have explored the depths of the world’s oceans while staying safely dry. Explorers have walked along the Great Wall of China.

Google has currently partnered with a variety of museums, sites, and educational organizations around the world to create content for expeditions. These include the American Museum of Natural History, the Planetary Society, the Palace of Versailles, and more. These partners will be working hard all summer to create more content in time for students to start the new school year in the fall.

Teachers can sign up now if they want to get Expeditions for their classroom. Google is also seeking people who want to help create content for Expeditions, sharing their local museums, landmarks, or generally interesting locales with countless students around the world.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

Mobile

Google and Qualcomm want to make more smart headphones with the Google Assistant

google qualcomm development kit assistant on headphones

Google wants to make it easier to create Google Assistant-powered earbuds and headsets, and so it has teamed up with Qualcomm to create chipsets that can help you keep the Assistant always accessible in your ear, but also make pairing with earbuds a much more simple process. It means your average $50 earbuds could have some smart tricks up its sleeves, and that you don't need to splurge on an expensive pair of buds just to access the Google Assistant on your phone.

These Bluetooth chips -- Qualcomm's QCC5100, QCC3024 and QCC3034 -- are built into a "Qualcomm Smart Headset Development Kit for the Google Assistant," which means it makes it dead simple for companies to implement the features into their own earbuds. It even comes with a reference design from Qualcomm and Google that shows off how one of these earbuds can be built with the chips inside.

Photography

As AR heads to Google search, Lens learns to translate, add tips, and more

google lens updates io 2019 sn104297

Computer vision puts the camera to use when you’re at a loss for words -- but Google Lens can soon do more than just reverse search for similar items or details about what’s in that photo. During I/O on Tuesday, May 7, Google demonstrated new search capabilities powered by the camera and expanded Lens skills for calculating tips, translating text, and more.

During the keynote, Aparna Chennapragada, Google’s vice president for the camera and augmented reality products, demonstrated how Google’s search results can use AR to bring 3D models into the room with you, without leaving the search results. A new “view in 3D button” pops up in the search results whenever 3D content is available.

Mobile

Google Assistant for Android and iOS wants to tell you a story

google assistant io 2018 feature

Google is bringing the "tell me a story" functionality to the mobile-based Google Assistant on Android and iOS, just in time for National Tell a Story Day on April 27.

The "tell me a story" command has been available on Google's range of Home smart speakers for some time now, and allows the Google Assistant to read a selection of short stories, including Let’s Be Firefighters! (Blaze and the Monster Machines), Robot Rampage (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and more. Starting from today, April 25, mobile users in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and India will also be able to access those same stories from their Google Assistant apps on iOS and Android. To use it, you do also need to make sure you have the latest version of Google Play Books installed for Android and iOS, as well as the latest version of the Google Assistant.