What Google’s virtual field trips look like in the classroom

Google Expeditions are field trips with a virtual reality twist

Last spring, Hector Camacho guided his high school economics class on comprehensive tours of the New York Stock Exchange, Federal Reserve banks, and the Treasury Building. Students swept their eyes up countless Neoclassical columns before heading inside for a detailed look — all without leaving the library of their Mountain View, California school.

The catch? Students were plugged into Google’s latest virtual reality creation — Expeditions, which creates immersive, 360-degree tours out of a cardboard viewer and a smartphone.

“The best thing about it that we can’t physically go to these faraway places,” Camacho said. “At the high school level, time is really precious. For field trips, you have to worry about buses, lunches, permission slips. If you can remove all those obstacles, still take them to a very faraway place, and give them a similar experience, that’s powerful.”

Next page: How Expeditions works