Tag: VR

AR and VR are supposed to be the next big thing. Augmented reality has always made sense to me. Most of the examples of VR I have seen to this point I would describe as “early days”. You can see the potential, but the experience was still pretty crude.

The Merge Cube will likely change the minds of many educators. We purchased some at Walmart (this is another story and I will explain at the end of this post). The Cube is a soft cube you hold in your hand and the cube interacts with apps on your smartphone (both iOS and Android) when you point the phone’s camera at the cube.

A few apps are free, but most likely to be of interest for classroom application cost a dollar or so. We have tried an anatomy app and a space app so far. Here are some screen captures from the phone from the anatomy app. You can insert your phone in a viewer for a 3D perspective, but just the phone works and that approach is less expensive.

Brain showing brain stem.

Heart external and internal views. The heart is beating. You can see the cube through the transparency of the internal view. A given view is manipulated by rotating and turning the cube. Moving between layers is manipulated from the screen of the phone.

The Walmart story

The Merge Cube and viewers are/were available at Walmart. Cindy learned from the Leslie Fischer blog that the cubes were being sold at Walmart for $1. We happen to be taking a winter break on the island of Kauai. This island has one Walmart. We made the trip to the store and purchased every cube they had (the stock for the entire island). The workers in the electronics department were completely mystified. We tried to explain these would be used in classrooms, the desire for all of their stock was perplexing. They asked where we were from and explained that there were probably Walmart stores were we live. We said it would be a while before we got home and the cubes might all be sold by then. We had a great time with the store staff.

Now to figure out how to get all of this stuff back to the mainland.