Review: Google’s Tango AR creates interactive educational experiences

Augmented Reality is taking on a more defined format for the consumer market: mobile devices. Google sees AR’s potential for educational uses.

At the Augmented World Expo, I met with Jared Finder, a Google software engineer working on Tango, the company’s new augmented reality technology for mobile devices.

“VR is about taking you to another world, whereas AR is about taking things and embedding them in the real world,” Finder said. “So I think that plays up also to educational uses. If you want to learn about something, what could be better than being there and seeing it?”

Google has made an app for K-12 education called Google Expeditions. It takes students through virtual field trips to volcanoes, coral reefs, and even the International Space Station. Initially, Expeditions was a VR experience created for Google Cardboard. The new Tango version let’s you experience those places in AR with other people in the real classroom.

“One thing that’s really cool about AR is that it’s a shared experience because it’s part of the real world, and we all share the real world,” Finder said.

The following video by Google explains how Tango Expeditions works.

(Photo courtesy of Northside ISD)