Today, Google’s newest VR tool, the Tour Creator, will be launched at the Google I/O 2018 Conference.
The new Google Tour Creator will let anyone create an immersive virtual reality environment using a set of web-based tools. The tool is primarily aimed at the education market and, like previous educational VR efforts by the company, this new tool is set to encourage students’ creativity.
“It’s been a success beyond anything we imagined,” Clay Bavor, Google’s VP of Virtual and Augmented Reality in charge of Daydream, said. “What we realized was, students and teachers, didn’t just want to go on expeditions. Many of them wanted to make them themselves.”
To create an immersive “tour,” a person will need a few 360-degree photos that they can upload from their camera or direct from the Google’s Street View catalog. From there, the tour can be composed by overlaying the still photos and text descriptions which identifies specific points of interest.
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The VR tool uses a clickable guide with notes and voiceovers so students can quickly knit together their photos.
“It’s not just a slideshow,” Bavor explained. “It can have narration, and interactive overlays, additional zoomed-in photos as part of the experience.”
The toolkit is web-based so that students can use it through a desktop browser. They can then publish the completed tour in Google’s 3D content portal, Poly.
It was reported that Google has already let some schools try the Tour Creator, including two high schools in Lancaster, PA, and Chicago.
“We’ve been working with a number of real estate companies who have been using Tour Creator to create virtual walkthroughs of homes,” Bavor went on to say. “One of the more interesting ones is KLM Airlines, which has built a set of tours using Tour Creator to train new employees in different aircraft.”
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