While most students are settling back into the classroom, teachers everywhere are thinking about how to keep their lesson plans fresh. The struggle is real, but it’s definitely worth it: students learn better and faster when they’re engaged with the material at hand. That’s one reason why we built Expeditions: it lets teachers take their classrooms on virtual field trips anywhere and get a completely different perspective. So as the school year kicks into high gear, we wanted to share a few updates to Expeditions that might help bring the lessons to life.

First, this week marks the start of the Expeditions AR Pioneer Program. Our team is hitting the road as we visit schools around the U.S. to bring augmented reality to the classroom.

Students will learn about topics like the circulatory system and Ancient Rome together by observing digital objects right in front of them. The program will kick off in Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Austin, and the New York City area, but these are just our first stops. We’ll be traveling across the United States with Expeditions AR throughout this school year, so if you’d like us to visit your school, please let us know by signing up.

We're also releasing five special VR expeditions this week featuring scenes from Earth VR. Earth VR is one of the most popular apps for high-end virtual reality systems, and it lets you explore the world in beautiful detail, but it needs more computing power than a smartphone can handle. But, thanks to a new tool that we announced at Google I/O called Seurat, it’s now possible to experience some of the magic of Earth VR on a mobile device. You can trek to the top of mountains like Mont Blanc or Kilimanjaro, and take a trip to some of the world’s most famous cities, including London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Access these new Earth Expeditions right in the app.

Last, we're bringing self-guided Expeditions to iOS (it’s already available on Android). So now, with an iPhone or iPad, anyone can explore anywhere Expeditions take you. It’s also great for guides who want to assign an Expedition for homework, or do a practice run before taking their classroom along. Check out more than 700 Expeditions including tours of universities, virtual career days, and even a trip to the  International Space Station. So grab Expeditions from Google Play or the App Store, and start exploring!

Jump is Google’s professional solution for creating seamless, 3D-360º VR video. We kicked off the Jump Start program to give creators access to Jump cameras, and we recently announced the second round of Jump Start participants. They’re working on some amazing stuff—everything from a VR musical to a film about a 9th century Viking raid in Ireland. Let’s take a look.

Andrew Asnes

Location: New York, USA
Andrew’s working on UpStage, a 360º Musical featuring Broadway composers, lyricists and stars that unfolds over five episodes as we follow a different character in each one.

Ben Ross and Brittany Neff

Location: Los Angeles, USA

Ben and Brittany are working on RESISTANCE, an episodic VR documentary about communities affected by and responding to a changing climate and a changing world.

Boris Maganic and Olivier Leroux

Location: Vancouver, Canada

Boris and Oliver take viewers on a picturesque journey exploring the Squamish and Lil'wat indigenous people's culture, traditions, music and arts.

Carole Chainon

Location: Los Angeles, USA

Carole ​is co-founder of JYC, an LA-based AR and VR video production studio. She’s shooting a documentary about the homeless community of NYC.

Celine Tricart—Lucid Dreams Productions

Location: Los Angeles, USA

Celine’s a VR filmmaker and founder of Lucid Dreams Productions. Her team’s work has been showcased at Sundance and won various awards.

Chris Campkin

Location: London, UK

Chris is a pioneering VR Cinematographer based in London.  Currently assigned in Kenya, he’s documenting the future of the last pristine landscapes of the world.

Declan Dowling

Location: Wicklow, Ireland

Tile Films is producing a VR short that follows the perilous journey of a 9th century Irish child whose village is attacked by Viking raiders. 

Elle Toussi

Location: Los Angeles, USA

Elle and team will be exploring the journey of a paralympic athlete competing in the Winter Olympics in South Korea in 2018.

Emily Cooper

Location: Los Angeles, USA

Emily is working on a narrative that explores one young woman’s struggle with depression. In “Move,” we discover the unspoken struggles of mental illness.

Enda Grace

Location: Kildare, Ireland

Enda founded Dundara Television & Media in Ireland. His VR team is working on "Ireland, Stud Farm Capital of The World" alongside other projects. 

Fitz Cahall

Location: Seattle, USA

Fitz is creative director at Duct Tape Then Beer, a production company focused on the outdoors. Skykomish is a visual postcard for his backyard mountain playground. 

Han Yan Yuen, Huijun Duan, Sharon Yeung and Szczepan Orlowski

Locations: Shenzhen, China; Hong Kong, China; London, UK

They’re working on “Meet me at the assembly line,” a personalized VR documentary where an everyday shopping trip gets interesting. 

Kayla Briët, Lovely Umayam, and Adriel Luis

Locations: Los Angeles, USA; Washington DC, USA

Kayla (filmmaker/ composer/ VR artist), Adriel (curator/producer), and Lovely (nuclear policy expert/Bombshelltoe founder/chief writer), are exploring nuclear topics through art and storytelling. 

Light Sail VR

Location: Los Angeles, USA

They’re working on an interactive live-action horror experience where, while camping in the forest, you unwittingly open a demon portal to the underworld.

L.Michelle Salvant

Location: Tallahassee, USA

L.Michelle is working on "The Rattler," an exclusive experience from inside the Florida A&M University Marching 100 Band.

Nate Hamlin

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free.”  Nate’s exploring what these words on the Statue of Liberty mean in America today.

PressureDrop.tv

Location: San Francisco, USA

PressureDrop.tv is creating a travel experience called, “Adventures in RocknRoll: Iceland “that will chronicle Iceland Airwaves 2017 and explore what makes Reykjavik such a magical destination.

Romain Vak

Location: Denver, USA

Romain’s working on “The Other,” which challenges implicit biases that exist deep within by facing those who carry the weight of misperception and oppression of identity.

Sarah Jones

Location: Birmingham, UK

Sarah’s working on “Abandoned;” it’s an artistic VR film that shows a range of urban performances in derelict spaces. 

Stina Hamlin and Jade Begay

Locations: New York City & Santa Fe, USA

Stina and Jade are working on Blood Memory VR: embark on a journey to recall where you came from and how we’re all connected to the earth. 

Tod Colegrove - DeLaMare Library, University of Nevada, Reno

Location: Reno, USA

They’re working on “Radical Inclusion: Sharing the Burning Man and Northern Nevada Experience” and capturing immersive content and experiences that bridge into the default world. 

Vobling

Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Vobling are working on a project about the northern parts of India: join a young girl in her everyday experience of the cotton fields. 

Youngmin Kim

Location: Los Angeles, USA

Youngmin is working on COUNTER, a highly stylized, subjective, and surreal look into the mind of a boxer and the psychology of fear in the ring.

Editor’s Note: When you build with WebVR, anyone can explore VR experiences with Chrome and Daydream View. Ste Thompson is CEO and Creative Director at Powster. In this post for developers, he explains how Powster uses WebVR to create immersive experiences in film environments that reach as wide an audience as possible.

Web-based VR experiences are key to making virtual reality accessible for everyone. Using a standard internet browser with WebVR technology, anyone can visit virtual worlds. At Powster, we’ve been using WebVR to create immersive film experiences. By taking 360º settings from actual movie scenes, we create environments that give audiences a sneak preview of that world.

It’s straightforward to create native WebVR experiences on Google Chrome thanks to Google Origin Trials. Native WebVR enables Google Daydream users to access the experience directly inside Daydream View. To do it, we had to set up HTTPS on our server and apply for a token, which provides access to experimental features. We also modified our code to fit the specifications of WebVR; the polyfill is less strict than the native WebVR, especially regarding the way a new frame is requested.

There’s another way to enable WebVR by using the Google Chrome flags: chrome://flags/#enable-webvr. This is generally more convenient during the development phase of your WebVR project, as you may not have an HTTPS server ready when developing. For the Valerian VR experience, we also updated our copy of Three.js (a 3D JavaScript library ready for WebVR) to the latest stable version in order to be compatible with the WebVR 1.1 specification.

The result is a native WebVR experience that’s fun, immersive and accessible to many. One recent example is STX’s “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” created in partnership with RealD. For the Valerian experience, you’ll find yourself on board the epic Intruder spaceship, looking out of its massive viewing window where the movie trailer plays. Check it out here.

Editor's Note: This is a design-focused post for anyone interested in creating art assets for virtual reality.

As a VR and AR artist, I’ve noticed two trends. First, new tools and practices that can make us better artists are appearing all the time. But also, techniques and skills from the late 90’s and early 00’s are making a comeback, and they apply to virtual reality because computing resources in VR are limited. If you’re just starting out, there’s a lot to consider. So if you’re an artist and you’re new to VR, here are some of my favorite tips for creating great assets.

• Never drop a frame. You need to keep your frame rate as high as possible, because the lower it goes, the greater the chance of discomfort and motion sickness due to conflicts between your inner ear and your visual inputs. One technique to keep your frame rate high is to create levels of detail (LODs). A character with 10,000 polygons only needs such a high resolution really close up. At further distances, you could swap in a 5,000 poly version, and then even lower poly models as the distance increases, all the way to a single polygon (LOD 4 in the diagram below). This will help with performance, and it works especially well for large groups of background characters that are always seen at a distance.
  

• Be aware of the textures you’re using. Busy, noisy and contrasting textures can be nauseating in VR, as they tend to cause a jittering look. However, flat textures with no detail can pose problems as well, because without texture it’s hard to measure motion or depth. Although extremes can work in non-VR experiences, avoid them in VR. 
  

• How it looks in VR is what matters. When designing assets in 2D, be sure to constantly check and see what it looks like in VR.  It can be cumbersome to jump back and forth, but your perspective will be different: volume and size are extremely present in VR. Putting that tree on a hill may look like a fine distance to cover when you’re designing in 2D, but once you’re in VR and comparing distances, it might not work at all.
  

• Make exploration fun, not hard. Exploration should be fun and available, but in VR you really want to clearly point out where to go. Create a visual language, like having orange torches near the proper dungeon exit, or street lights in a zombie apocalypse. These are subtle yet important indicators, because it’s very easy to become lost in VR.
  

Hopefully, these tips will be useful as you get started creating art in VR. We’re all on the edge of a new frontier, and because of that, we’re learning all the time. It’s great. What are some of your favorite tips and tricks? Let’s get a conversation going; use #VRArtTips to share.

Editor’s note: Tilt Brush lets you paint in 3D space with virtual reality. Earlier this year, we launched the Artist in Residence (AiR) program to showcase what’s possible when creative artists experiment with this new medium. The resulting works of art have been amazing, and you can check some of them out on our website, or right in the Tilt Brush app itself.

1. Could you walk us through your creative process in Tilt Brush?

Working in Tilt Brush has always felt very natural. At no point during my first doodles did I ever feel intimidated by the software, and I think that's a huge strength of Tilt Brush. Getting comfortable drawing in this new medium was just a matter of putting in the time and experimenting, which is easy to do when it's so much fun. Lots of moments of, "I wonder if this would work?"—even a year into working with Tilt Brush.

2. How is Tilt Brush different from working in other mediums? Is the openness ever daunting?

I don't find it daunting at all—it's a very liberating way of working. I've spent years working in traditional professional 3D software, bogged down in the interfaces, clicking around for hours making 3D shapes on a 2D screen. Tilt Brush removes all of that tedium and places the artist directly into a creative space where they can conjure up anything with a few gestures in thin air. It's magic.

3. What inspires you?

I come from a video game background, so I've kind of approached my VR art from that direction, creating places, vehicles and characters I'd like to see come to life in a game. All my spaceship stuff comes from a childhood of playing X-Wing, Wing Commander and the like. A cool thing—I'd never been interested in designing any kind of vehicle, even awesome spacecraft, before Tilt Brush. I've always much preferred drawing and sculpting characters over dealing with perspective in 2D or tedious (to me) hard surface modeling in 3D programs. Tilt Brush really opened the door for me in that regard and I'm getting to explore brand new, really fascinating subjects.

4. Were there any funny moments or cool things that happened while using Tilt Brush?

In the dark days before the ability to scale sketches was added, I had to work in some pretty silly positions to draw things like feet and the tops of heads. I nearly ended up standing on a chair to draw a tall tree but decided I didn't want to be the first VR casualty! I have the opposite problem now—I'll end up moving far, far above my environment to work on the sky and startle myself when I look down. I actually think it's really cool that my own art can spook me like that!

5. Do you have any neat trips or tricks?

A lot of people ask how I get my sketches so solid. Here's a secret: they're not solid at all. I fill the space in between my lines with the "Wire" brush. This brush is 3D and unlit (no shadows or highlights), so even if the geometry it makes is a messy bunch of tubes, you'll never see the mess—only the solid silhouette. As long as my silhouette looks good from most directions, the sketch looks solid and totally 3D. Same with the various "Marker" brushes— they're all unlit, so you can get away with being a bit messy!

6. What’s your favorite piece?

My favorite personal piece has to be this spaceship in asteroid field (displayed above). The 3D-comic style I'd been pushing for finally started coming together with that piece, and I started feeling confident about doing more vehicle and hard surface work. When I look at it, I get excited to make more things in that style and world.

The piece I'm most proud of, though, has to be Wonder Woman: Art of Wonder (displayed above). It was a huge honor to bring the amazing Wonder Woman to life in Tilt Brush, and so much fun!

With Google Earth VR, you can go anywhere in virtual reality. Whether you want to stroll along the canals of Venice, stand at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro or soar through the sky faster than a speeding bullet, there’s no shortage of things to do or ways to explore. We love this sense of possibility, so we’re bringing Street View to Earth VR to make it easier for you to see and experience the world.

This update lets you explore Street View imagery from 85 countries right within Earth VR. Just fly down closer to street level, check your controller to see if Street View is available and enter an immersive 360° photo. You’ll find photos from the Street View team and those shared by people all around the world.

If you need a fun place to start, check out a couple of our favorite spots. Make your way out to AT&T Park in San Francisco, or head to the Old Port in Westeros … er, Croatia to see King's Landing from “Game of Thrones.”

The new version of Earth VR is available today for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. And if you don’t have one of those systems, you can still check out Street View in VR with your phone—just download the Street View app for Daydream and Cardboard.

With Google Earth VR, you can go anywhere in virtual reality. Whether you want to stroll along the canals of Venice, stand at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro or soar through the sky faster than a speeding bullet, there’s no shortage of things to do or ways to explore. We love this sense of possibility, so we’re bringing Street View to Earth VR to make it easier for you to see and experience the world.

This update lets you explore Street View imagery from 85 countries right within Earth VR. Just fly down closer to street level, check your controller to see if Street View is available and enter an immersive 360° photo. You’ll find photos from the Street View team and those shared by people all around the world.

If you need a fun place to start, check out a couple of our favorite spots. Make your way out to AT&T Park in San Francisco, or head to the Old Port in Westeros … er, Croatia to see King's Landing from “Game of Thrones.”

The new version of Earth VR is available today for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. And if you don’t have one of those systems, you can still check out Street View in VR with your phone—just download the Street View app for Daydream and Cardboard.

ARCore brings augmented reality capabilities to millions of Android phones. It’s available as an SDK preview, and developers can start experimenting with it right now. We’ve already seen some really fun, useful and delightful experiences come through; check out thisisarcore.com for some of our favorites.

Daydream Labs has been in on the fun and experimentation, too. We’re exploring new interactions, including unique ways to learn about the world around you, different ways to navigate, and new ways to socialize and play with friends.

Here’s some of what we’ve made so far!

Using AR as a magic window into Street View

We built a prototype that lets you zoom into The British Museum and see Street View panoramas from the front of Great Russell Street.

Helping you see the future

With AR, we prototyped a way for architects to overlay models on top of construction in the real world to show how a finished home would look.

Skills training with ARCore

Controlling virtual position through reality

We built a way to explore Street View without having to click arrows—just walk forward in physical space to adjust your virtual position.

Highlight AR content

We played around with the idea of putting floating AR content in front of the user, and controlling depth of field and desaturation of the camera feed based on user motion. This experiment allows digital assets to “pop,” directing people's attention there and encouraging them to explore and interact.

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