I Went on a Field Trip to Mars with a Piece of Cardboard
A Martian panorama taken by NASA's Spirit Rover, April 2009. Photo: NASA

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I Went on a Field Trip to Mars with a Piece of Cardboard

Google plans to sell Cardboard, its super-cheap VR viewer that’s literally made of cardboard, to schools as a way of offering virtual field trips.

Tucked away on the third floor of the Moscone Center at Google's annual developer conference I/O, a group of about 20 people peer into boxes that turn smartphones into virtual reality devices, swivel around in their seats, listening and watching a former NASA engineer give a guided tour of Mars.

The imagery is from NASA's Spirit probe, which spent several years roaming the Martian surface, sending back all sorts of data about the planet over several years, far longer than it was designed to operate. And the images are stunning. Wearing the latest iteration of Cardboard, Google's super-cheap VR viewer that's literally made of cardboard, I was able to scan the Martian horizon, look up into the sky, and around various locations that Spirit photographed.

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All the while, Scott Maxwell, a Google employee who was one of the Spirit rover's drivers, explained what was going on. Maxwell pointed out various rocks, mountains, and other geological features, with visual cues helping turn our heads and swivel our chairs to the right spot.

Eventually, Google's vision is to sell this type of a setup to schools, as a way of offering virtual field trips. The company has been running eight pilot projects in schools across the world, including one in Ghana. The full setup includes a teacher app used to guide the presentation, and the virtual field trips may one day include three dimensional video.

Photo by the author

Cardboard itself is fairly straightforward looking, and for short presentations and lessons, it didn't bother me to hold the contraption against my face for short periods of time. And, periodically throughout the presentation, Maxwell, the former NASA engineer, would halt, ask us to put our Cardboards down, and do some more explanation.

Unlike some of the other virtual reality headsets I've tried, such as Oculus Rift, Google's Tango (with the headstrap), and Birdly, using Cardboard in this way isn't a solitary experience. Sitting with the other people, listening to Maxwell over headphones—the product manager said that under normal circumstances there'd be no need for headphones, they would just speak—I almost felt like I was back in school. At one point I even raised my hand and asked a question about the mission.

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The system isn't ready or available to the general public at this point. Despite going through several iterations during the pilot phase of the project, Benjamin Schrom, Cardboard's product manager, said they're still working on finding the right phone. The Nexus 5 would be overkill, for example, as there's no real reason to have near-field communication technology built in.

The vision Schrom outlined wasn't a Cardboard set up in every classroom. He thinks that schools will purchase a few units that would be shared between multiple classrooms and teachers.

"I don't think teachers are broken," he said. "But I do think that this will make field trips to far away, otherwise inaccessible places available to teachers and students who otherwise would never see them."

Cardboard also doesn't rely on the internet, instead serving the content from the teacher's app over a WiFi network.

But, even though I felt connected to everyone watching, we were all still fairly oblivious of the outside world. Midway through the presentation a television camera got right in my face, and I didn't even notice. I was on Mars, after all.