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Three Ways to Make Your Own Virtual Reality Tours

Last week Google released a new tool for creating your virtual reality tours that can be viewed in either your web browser or in a Google Cardboard VR viewer. This free tool is called Tour Creator. Some of the ways that you might have students use Tour Creator include creating immersive tours of local landmarks, telling stories about places they’ve visited, or to create tours explaining unique geological features. All of those things can be done with Tour Creator, Cardboard Camera, or Patches VR.

Tour Creator lets you use 360 degree Google Street View imagery and or upload your own 360 degree imagery to build a tour. Within each image you can add additional points of interest in the forms of image overlays and or text. Watch this video overview of Tour Creator that I published last week.

Patches is a free online tool for creating virtual reality scenes. Patches offers animated characters, animals, buildings, and common objects that you can place inside a virtual reality scene. Just drag and drop objects and animations from the selection menus to the Patches design canvas. You can create and customize your VR scenes as much as you like by changing object positioning, color schemes, and even the speed at which an animation moves. You can preview your VR scenes within the Patches editor. Completed projects can be viewed in a VR viewer by just enter the link assigned to your project into your mobile phone’s browser.

Google’s Cardboard Camera App will let you create narrated panoramic images to view in virtual reality headsets. The images that are captured through the app aren’t true 360 degree images. The trade-off is that you can capture audio with your images. Watch my following video to learn how to use Google’s Cardboard Camera App. You can get the Cardboard Camera app for Android here and the iPhone version here.

These were the week’s most popular posts on FreeTech4Teachers.com:
1. Six New Features Coming to Google Forms
2. Create a Video Lesson Completely In PowerPoint
3. How to Use Google’s New VR Tour Creator
4. Weebly vs. Google Sites
5. Changes Coming to the Google Drive User Interface – Web Version
6. Reminder – The Google Drive Desktop App Is Being Phased Out
7. Animaker Edify – Easily Create Animated Videos In an Online Classroom

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