Thanking my friend Dennis Grice for sharing this one out. There is a new site called Cospaces.io that provides a creative environment for building 3D worlds that can be explored in virtual reality (VR) or from laptop. The learning curve is small and the payoff can be big.
The first question a teacher needs to be asking these days is, "What are the terms of service / Privacy?" The company owning Cospaces has communicated that they want this product to be student friendly and they are changing privacy language to allow for under 13yr students.
The website is young, but the developers are reaching out to teachers to ask what can be added or provided that makes this tool work for the classroom. There have been questions about including Google+ logins and classroom support. Their support has been impressive so far.
It is a free tool right now and they are considering some subscription options. I'm not sure how much will stay free with time. So get on it now while it is free!!
So, what is it?? Students (with email accounts) can go onto the website and start creating a project. Using objects from their impressive graphic collection, you can build a 3d scene by placing objects anywhere on or above the environment's surface. Objects can be moved, rotated, elevated, colorized and more. You can create vertical or horizontal text surfaces to provide context to the scene you are building. (There does not seem to be any font styling options yet.) The 'search internet for images' feature hasn't worked for me, but I could easily drag and drop an image file from my computer into the import window.
When you starting reading this post, you started hearing my beautiful daughter saying her ABC's. (And no, you can't stop her without hitting your mute button. But why would you? :) Your project allows you to import an audio file, mine was a .wav file, and it plays when viewing the world in your browser. When experiencing this in VR, the audio did not play. I'm looking forward to being able to trigger audio within the world, perhaps play a file when I get close to certain objects.
My teacher brain loves that I did all of the above for free. I loves even more that the project that was created was shared via URL or embedded (like in this blog below). Unlike Minecraft, teachers don't pay to install software and run a special server just to create a world that mom and dad can't see easily at home. Cospaces projects can be experienced on any laptop using just the shared URL.
The laptop browser creates the world. Using your iOS or Android device, you can experience the world in VR. Open the project with your Google Goggles and step into your creation. Without the goggles, you can finger-push your way through the world or move the phone around to see around you.
I am already a fan of Cospaces.io and look forward to how they will continue to develope it and how students will use it in our classrooms!
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