Fieldscapes at the Malvern Festival of Innovation

Oculus Rift on the Moon

For the second year in a row we ran a set of workshops at the Malvern Festival of Innovation playing host to a succession of groups of 20-30 students (mostly year 7s) from around Worcestershire and giving them a 1 hour introduction to immersive learning. We set up four stands in order to show the range of experiences and lessons that can be created, and the different ways in which they can be delivered. We had:

• One laptop running the Solar System lesson
• One laptop running the Apollo Educate lesson
• One laptop running the Introduction to Carding Mill (which several groups knew from Fieldtrips)
• A couple of Google Cardboards, one with the Photosphere tour of Carding Mill and one the Apollo Explore lesson
• Oculus Rift running Apollo Explore

Playing tag on the Moon!

Students were split into groups of about 5 and had 10 minutes on each "stand" - so everyone got to try all the kit.

Looking at the Waterspout Waterfall in a (plastic) Google Cardboard

Student feedback from comments and feedback forms included:

• "I wish I could spend all afternoon here"
• "Can I come back later?"
• "It was really cool"
• "It was fun to do"
• "It was memorable"
• "The realness of it"
• "I liked the fact that we were not there but we could see everything"
• "It was like it was real"
• "It was educating and fun"

Exploring the Moon and Apollo on Google Cardboard

When talking to the teacher we were keen to highlight that:

• They didn't have to buy any new hardware, like expensive VR headsets, as they can run lessons in 2D/3D mode on existing computers, or in VR on Google Cardboard (one teacher loaded the app onto his phone as we spoke)
• They could create their own lessons, share them, and use (and customise) those producted by other users
• With our licencing model they only started paying once they started using it in class, so they could explore and test for free until they were confident in the system and lessons and were ready to use it in class.

Even the teachers got in on the act!

Fieldscapes itself was rock solid on all the devices all day - despite getting a hammering from the kids. What was particularly impressive was when we had the Apollo experiences in multi-user mode so the kids could play tag on the moon - and even using the public wifi at the venue we had no issues with lag and avatar movement was very smooth.

All in all a great day and helped remind us all why we've built Fieldscapes!