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.
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.