Google’s mission statement is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and so it’s a natural fit that they’d be a leader in creating educational experiences for AR & VR. Google Expeditions continues to grow it’s library with 800 new expeditions where they have brought it to 3 million students with their Google Expeditions Pioneer program. They will be expanding to adding AR support for Expeditions soon, and there is also a set of virtual laboratory experiences created by Labster’s that schools can use to supplement or replace their existing labs with virtual biology or chemistry labs. Google also announced Tour Creator, at Google I/O which will allow anyone to create annotated virtual tours with 360 photos that they take or screengrab from Google Streetview. These tours can be uploaded to Google Poly where WebXR will be enabled so that these virtual tour experiences can be shared through a URL.
I had a chance to catch up with a couple of people on Google’s VR/AR Team at Google I/O including Jennifer Holland, who is a program manager for Google Expeditions & Tour Creator as well as Brit Mennuti, a Product Manager for Blocks, Poly, & Tour Creator. I talked with Holland last year at Google I/O, and so she filled me in on everything that’s new with Google’s immersive education initiatives including Google Expeditions, Virtual Tours, and Best Buy’s Google Expeditions Kits.
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[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So over the last couple of weeks, I've been to four different conferences back-to-back. It was Facebook F8, to then VR LA, to then Microsoft Build, and then Google I.O. And so three of them were developer conferences for Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, and you get different vibes that are happening at each of these different companies. Facebook tends to be very much like the agencies that are doing these different advertising campaigns for different companies. So you get a lot of creatives working at agencies as well as a very international flavor of people from all over the world that are using different Facebook products. And then Microsoft Build was extremely like enterprise centered. So people who are building applications for the enterprise. And so they're very serious and very much into solving business problems. VRLA was not a developer conference, but it was a lot of the creatives and people who were in the entertainment industry trying to find like applications for VR that I guess aren't always consumer focused, but there is certainly a consumer focus at VRLA, but that's also just seeing what is possible with the medium and how you can have these different experiences that people want to have in VR. And then finally, Google was, I guess Google's got a lot of like AI. And so it's the most decentralized open. So it's the people who are wanting to make stuff, very much a maker flavor of these different tools that are made available for people to create all sorts of different stuff. Android as an operating system is diffuse out to all sorts of different technologies all across the entire spectrum of the human experience. But it tends to also be a lot of artificial intelligence that we're talking about, a lot of tools that they're creating, but also some new stuff within mostly augmented reality, but also they have made an announcement about Google tours for education. So generally Google tends to be about information and education and just freely distributing stuff. And they're not always about like, you know, helping you figure out how to actually make a living off of stuff. It's sort of like, get stuff out there like Google Polly, but there won't be a way for you to sell 3D models, for example. It's like the tools to be able to freely share stuff, but it's a little less focused on the economic models of everything. Like something like YouTube, for example, you can create whatever you want and you can use their advertising to be able to make a living. And I think that's kind of generally how Android is. It's very decentralized. It's like, hey, here are the tools to make cool stuff. Go figure it out and make stuff. And if you can make a living off of it, that's great. So the education, though, I think is one of the areas where it is actually great to be able to have this freely accessible repositories of different stuff, especially for teachers who don't have a lot of budget. And so the Google Expeditions has actually been, I think, of all the other different entities and projects that are within the VR space, Google Expeditions is the most robust when it comes to thinking about like, what is VR education going to look like? They've been creating these different expeditions and they just launched a new tool called the Virtual Tours, where you're able to essentially either take a Ricoh Theta camera, take 360 photos and annotate them and then bundle them all up and put them onto Google Polly. Or if even if you don't have a 360 camera, you can take a street view capture of a scene and then be able to take that and start to annotate it as well. And so creating these virtual tours are going to enable people to create these guided tours anywhere on the planet and be able to share them on Google Poly that then can be ingested into these headsets. So I talked to a couple of people who were on the Google Expeditions team, as well as the product managers, VR, AR, working on some of these different products, including Blocks and Poly, as well as these virtual tours. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Britt and Jennifer happened on Wednesday, May 9th, 2018 at the Google I-O conference in Mountain View, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:09.463] Jennifer Holland: Yeah, I'm Jennifer Holland, and I am the program manager for Expeditions, as well as Tour Creator, and work across both AR and VR, as well as G Suite for Education.
[00:04:20.591] Brit Mennuti: And I'm Britt Manute. I'm a product manager on the Google AR and VR team. And I focus on building tools to help make it easier to create content for AR and VR, so Blocks, Poly, and Torque Creator.
[00:04:31.161] Kent Bye: OK, great. So there's been some new announcements about this tour creator, but also there's a presentation that you gave today just kind of giving an update as to what's happening with education and virtual reality. And so there's been a lot of stuff with K-12 education, but maybe you could talk a bit about some of the things that you were talking about, what's happening and what's new with education and VR with the Google Expeditions.
[00:04:52.330] Jennifer Holland: Yeah, so since we last talked a year ago, a lot has happened. We brought Expeditions to over 3 million students around the globe, specifically through the Pioneer program, which has been really exciting. We have also had over 6 million app downloads with Expeditions, which we're really excited about. We're seeing lots of teachers and students use our content every day in their classroom to create these immersive experiences. We have over 800 new expeditions. And later this month, which we announced today, we'll be actually releasing our app with an AR functionality within it. So you'll have AR and VR tours, which is really exciting. And then the other big announcement that we made actually is two. One is we've been working with a company called Labster, which is a science education company in Denmark, to basically unlock the physical lab requirements to complete an online biology degree using virtual reality. So there are 30 labs that really do advanced simulations using mathematical equations and really have real world outcomes and can be supplemented both with existing curriculum or you can complete it completely online. And that content is also very relevant for K-12 schools because the VR labs themselves map to AP and IB courses. So we're seeing schools interested in supplementing their existing lab programs, or schools that really financially don't have the resources to create labs, be able to offer a full laboratory using the Labster VR labs. And then Brit has been working, we've been working together to launch a new product called Tour Creator. So it was really, you know, the initial idea came out of expeditions of teachers wanting to be able to create their own immersive experiences. Students wanted to be able to use it as a tool for their own projects. But we quickly realized that there was broader opportunity, and so Brit can talk more about that. I appreciate that.
[00:06:40.498] Brit Mennuti: Yeah, so in the same way that VR can aid in understanding inside the classroom, we realized that the same sort of concept could apply outside the classroom and often in the business world. So a great example is real estate. Like, you know, when you're buying a house, for instance, you think about referencing things like photos, brochures, pamphlets, floor plans, and those are all sort of like abstract representations of the actual thing. And so we thought to ourselves, well, wouldn't it be better if you could actually be immersed in a virtual version of a house before you committed to purchasing it or committing to go see it? And so we figured that things like expeditions could be useful to other applications. So that includes things like real estate, enterprise training. We're seeing airlines, like KLM Airlines, use the tool to create training content so that their flight crew gets sort of familiar with the aircraft before they even set foot inside of it. And then other applications just in lifestyle and tourism and travel. So Time Out New York has been making amazing tours of all the greatest spots all over New York City, like the New York Public Library and Central Park. We're working with a company called Imagine It Done that helps people organize their lives in their closets and they're using it to showcase their expertise to potential clients. So we're seeing broad applications across a whole bunch of use cases.
[00:07:49.267] Kent Bye: Yeah, and in terms of the Labster experiences, when I saw that, you know, I had been in chemistry classes in both in high school and college, and I know there's labs and they're trying to essentially recreate that lab experience for you to be able to actually experiment with doing these different combinations. Are these like generally available or do you have to be kind of like signed up to one of the courses in order to get access to some of this content?
[00:08:11.350] Jennifer Holland: Yeah, I mean, no, Labster has an app on the Play Store. And so you can go on, and if you're interested and a biology enthusiast, you can go through and complete the VR labs. And their labs also work on Chrome as well. So you don't get the immersive experience like you do with VR, but they also do have Chrome labs as well.
[00:08:29.987] Kent Bye: OK, and a lot of the other Google Expeditions also have the ability for people to share, well, who is actually creating these different modules and be able to put these lessons up on Google Expeditions? Is this something that teachers can create themselves and be able to share amongst each other? Or is that kind of a curated list of people who are creating these?
[00:08:48.563] Jennifer Holland: Yeah, so when we started creating our expeditions, it was actually pretty difficult. Like, we looked back, my team had to figure out how to do it. And what we wanted to do is create enough tours so that teachers could really add it to their existing curriculum, you know, be able to incorporate it in a variety of subjects. We now have a growing library of over 800 tours, which we're really proud of. And we're seeing those tours used across different subjects and grades. And, you know, a lot of the same tours are used in multiple variations, which is exciting. With Tour Creator, we're really putting it in the hands of teachers and students. So they can, you know, capture their own 360 images, or they can use the corpus of Street View to really create their own tours and These tours from these schools and these kids is awesome. I mean, they are showing their communities why they love where they live. You really get to understand. We went to Penn Manor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and learned all about farming and milking a cow, which is not something that we get to do in New York City. or schools in Bali getting to see what their school looks like. So it's been an amazing tool for students to show each other where they come from in their communities, which I think is something really important that we've strived for. And then you'll eventually be able to experience these tours as a guided experience in the Expeditions app. Right now, that feature doesn't exist, but it's something that we're adding. And so an individual can published to Poly and view it right on Poly, or they can use that embed code and put it on a school website.
[00:10:17.356] Kent Bye: Yeah, so Britt, you were walking through the workflow for how to create one of these tours, and I saw that they were just using a Ricoh Theta camera, so being able to actually take the 360 photo, and then having a web app to be able to go in, and I don't know if that Theta has a GPS corresponding to it, or you have to kind of locate it on the map, essentially geolocating it so then you can put it to where it's at in space but also go in and start to tag different dimensions of what's happening in that scene. And so maybe you could just sort of step through like that workflow of like being able to do all that and then how it's like published on Poly.
[00:10:51.106] Brit Mennuti: Yeah, sure. So when you start with your tour, you essentially start with some basic metadata. So you give it a title, a description. You choose a category. We have tons of categories on Poly that apply to these types of tours. And you add a cover photo. And then you fill it with scenes. And the scenes can be your own 360 photos. So if you do have a 360 camera, that's great. You can easily upload them. But if you don't, we're actually directly integrated with Street View. And so what this means is you can actually just type in an address. And we'll pull up the relevant 360 photo that we have in Google Maps. And you can use that as your scene. So essentially, even if you don't have a 360 camera, you have the power to create your own VR content with this tool. Once you add your scenes, you add what we call points of interest. These are basically areas within the scene of importance that you want to highlight. You can add a little bit of text information to those points of interest, and you can also upload some rich media on top of them. So things like 2D images. And in the future, we'll have things like narration and ambient audio, which we found to be really important in terms of VR to make the user feel like they're really actually there. And then you publish your tour to the web, to Polly. Polly is Google's library for 3D content. We launched it last year. And previously, Polly has things like 3D models, 3D sketches from Tilt Brush. But now, we'll also include 3D experiences in the form of these tours. And the beautiful thing about publishing to Poly is that we're taking advantage of WebXR. So what this means is that with only a URL, you can actually experience that content in VR in any VR headset without having to install any sort of application. So it's a really beautiful melding together of different Google technologies.
[00:12:21.005] Kent Bye: Now, I imagine that there's a lot of people who, you know, make a living off of giving tours and they may want to create these, but it seems like at this point it's kind of an educational thing. It's Creative Commons. People are sharing it openly. But do you imagine that people would somehow be able to get paid for creating some of these? Or if there's like a mechanism by either you pay up front or just maybe have some sort of like donation afterwards or something just to be able to take it to the next level?
[00:12:46.501] Jennifer Holland: Yeah, I mean, We wanted to create a tool that was accessible, right? And we've done that. And so we're excited to see how this tool is going to be used in the future. We definitely see broad application with enterprise companies wanting to do it. I can imagine a lot of people specializing and being able to create really compelling and beautiful tours and really be able to create a whole business around it. So we would be thrilled with that and seeing that demand. But we just launched today, so it's a little early.
[00:13:16.195] Brit Mennuti: One other thing I'll say, too, is in advance of launching the product, we partnered with local guides, which are a whole bunch of folks who are really big enthusiasts with Google Maps. And they go around, they write reviews, and they make Google Maps a really content-rich experience. And a lot of these local guides are actually photographers. And so they take a lot of 360 photos for a living. And they've been using Tour Creator as a way to showcase their material. Another beautiful thing about the product is that if you do use somebody's 360 photo, let's say you pay them for it, you can actually give them credit. And we transfer those credits, you write them into the tool, we transfer them over to Poly. So when you view that tour on Poly, you'll actually get to see all the photographers that contributed to it. So I think it's a really great way for somebody to actually showcase their ability, especially in a field like 360 photography, which is a little bit more nascent than traditional photography.
[00:14:02.042] Kent Bye: And talking to the Google Earth VR engineers, there's a number of different features that have, like, you know, KLM files to be able to do what was essentially replicating all of this functionality of the photos and the annotations and the, like, is there any plans to eventually kind of, like, merge a lot of this functionality into something like Google Earth VR? So if you wanted to just zoom around and see if there was specific expeditions, that that could be your web browser rather than going through something like Poly. It's something that's much more geospatially oriented where you can just discover some of these places that may have guided tours there.
[00:14:37.119] Jennifer Holland: It's a great idea. If you want to see that, you should submit a feature. Consider it submitted. We as a team want to find more integrations and work with one another. Obviously, Tour Creator with Poly is that extension and working with Expeditions. And so we'd welcome the opportunity to work with the Google Earth team.
[00:14:56.933] Kent Bye: Okay. And there was also, you know, speaking of Google Earth, there was a mention of how there's a specific process to take some of the Google Earth data and be able to put it into Expeditions. I guess it's with the Surat. You know, what is happening there to be able to take the complexity of that data and to be able to make it available for something that could be seen on a mobile VR headset?
[00:15:16.637] Jennifer Holland: So it's using this rot tool to be able to basically, it's almost like you can take a cylinder of any point within an earth scene, and we have a couple of tours that we've done that with. We don't have, I think we have like six or eight of those right now, and they're really beautiful. They're high quality, they're 3D, and they really, I mean, you feel like you're there in a really neat way. And a lot of ways that with Google Jump and you get that 3D perspective with the 360 photos and video, you get that with Serat. And so we're still experimenting. It's like really early. It's taken us a little bit of time to put those tours together, but it's something that we want to create more.
[00:15:54.541] Kent Bye: With there was also like a best buy like I guess it was like a whole cart of immersive media thing to add both Virtuality augmented reality maybe you could talk a bit about like what some of these Carts are for teachers to be able to essentially create the AV cart that has all these immersive technologies. I
[00:16:12.980] Jennifer Holland: Yeah, so Best Buy for Education has been an awesome partner and one of ours from the early days of Expeditions. And what they provide is a whole kit for school to be able to get going using Expeditions. The beauty of Expeditions is that one works without the internet. and we create a local network so the guide can bring students throughout each of the panels but doesn't require the school Wi-Fi which can be pretty constrained. And it also works on a variety of different devices. So even if you don't have an Expeditions kit like Best Buy, you can use your tablet both on Android and iOS, your mobile device. And so we're seeing a lot of applications for teachers being able to use Expeditions, but without a cart. Now schools that have purchased a cart, it's been great. It's usually like a shared device. There are different models, but 10, 20, 30 devices, depending on what the school purchases. It comes with a VR headset. And now with the AR functionality coming, they'll have mobile devices that do AR and VR, which is the ASUS ZenFone. And it has a selfie stick, which we actually found early on, people laughed at us, like, you know, what are you having these kids take selfies? Turns out the selfie stick's actually a great way for an AR experience, because their fingers don't, you know, hit the different buttons on the phone and crash out of the app. And so it allows them to, you know, get up close, take a step back, and get a sense of the scale. And also, you know, just keeps things in check. So Best Buy is going to start selling the AR and VR kit, which has phones, the viewers, the router, the teacher tablet, and the selfie sticks.
[00:17:45.112] Kent Bye: And there seemed to be a theme of moving from the abstractions of language and text and moving into like concrete experiences that are both direct experiences, but they're immersed into the these scenes. So I'm curious to hear some of the feedback or metrics that you're looking at to reassure yourself that this is a path that is both working and sort of worth continuing and growing.
[00:18:05.590] Jennifer Holland: Yeah, we rely 100% on teacher and student feedback. That's honestly what drives what we work on. I'm a former teacher. Ben, my colleague, is a former teacher. And for us, even though we haven't been in the classroom for a while, it's really important that we work alongside teachers and students to make sure that what we're building is actually useful. One of the metrics that we look at is how much training time is needed for teachers to be able to use the technology. As a former teacher, if I have to spend hours learning how to use the technology and then it breaks right when I get going, that's not useful, especially when you have 30 students looking right at you waiting for something to happen. So for us, making sure that we bring that barrier down to make it really easy and seamless to use in the classroom is number one priority. We want teachers to feel confident with the technology. We don't want you to have to spend hours upon hours in professional development training, learning how to use those tools. The other piece is we want school to be fun and engaging. And the feedback that we've gotten from teachers, I mean, all you have to do is go on Twitter and look at hashtag Google Expeditions, and you will just see magic happening in the classroom. We've had teachers write to us. I mean, we get so many letters from students and teachers about just the experience of what it was like to bring Expeditions into their classroom. And, you know, teachers who have been at it for a long time and have been teaching the lessons, you know, with slight nuances have been totally blown away with the level of engagement and excitement for the technology. And the nice thing about it is it hasn't been the technology that's been the exciting piece. It's the experience. And many of them cite that as, you know, their students are able to go so much deeper with the material because they visually have an understanding of what's happening. So much of learning is an abstraction for students, and they're having to put these mental models together in order to understand a theory or a concept. With AR and VR, it immediately, you fast forward a bit, and a student already has that mental model, and now can focus on what the teacher's actually trying to teach them, which is like the theory, and how it applies. And, I mean, a fifth grader said it best. He was like, you know, I don't have to assemble this mental model of what my teacher's asking. I can see it, and now I can focus on what it means. And that's what learning is about. And sparking that level of curiosity and excitement for learning is really what we're after.
[00:20:19.409] Kent Bye: So what's next? What are some of the biggest problems you're trying to solve or questions that you're trying to answer?
[00:20:26.253] Jennifer Holland: I mean, we want to keep building. Today, I'm like, well, we just launched a tour creator. I think we're really excited to see what the world does with this tool. And, you know, for us on the education side, it's exciting because we're now putting that creation tool in the power of students, which is You always want your students to be able to create stuff. And I think we're also equally excited to see how businesses and consumers, I imagine, will see a lot of family tours and vacations, which is exciting. Especially having a new son myself, being able to go back in time and look at some of those moments is pretty powerful. We're excited to see where that takes us and just being able to offer more and more experiences like this.
[00:21:07.313] Brit Mennuti: Yeah, I think another thing that I'm particularly excited about is seeing what new use cases for the tool of Tor Creator that people have that we haven't thought of yet. As a product manager who worked on blocks, when we originally conceived of blocks, we thought that people would use it to model just singular 3D objects. And what actually happened is that people were creating entire 3D VR scenes with this product. And that was not something we ever envisioned would happen, but we were so glad it did because it gave us a new understanding for where the product could go in the future. I think the same could be true of Tour Creator. So we'll see what people do with these different photos, how they annotate them, how they add different media to them, the applications they use them for, and there'll perhaps be new opportunities for us to expand the product.
[00:21:48.090] Jennifer Holland: I'll just say we take feedback very seriously, which I know you know. And we ask everybody to just submit feedback using that send feedback button. We read every single piece of feedback and we respond. So if there are things that are missing or you want certain features, please let us know because that's how we decide what to build next.
[00:22:06.765] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual and augmented reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:22:16.533] Jennifer Holland: I'm just really excited about just making learning more accessible. You can imagine some of the most brilliant teachers and professors being able to offer experiences and students be able to leverage the technology to create experiences that would otherwise be impossible.
[00:22:33.767] Brit Mennuti: My background is partially in business and partially in fine arts. And one of the things that I'm super stoked about in terms of AR and VR is it's a whole new medium for artists to actually express themselves and for people who maybe don't consider themselves artists to find a new way to express themselves. So even seeing teachers and students create expeditions, it's a marvelous thing to see them be creative. So I'm looking forward to seeing how this industry moves forward in terms of creative expression.
[00:22:57.566] Kent Bye: All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:23:01.209] Jennifer Holland: Thanks for having us. Thanks.
[00:23:03.240] Kent Bye: So, that was Jennifer Holland. She's a program manager for the Expeditions and Tour Creator on the ARVR team, as well as Brent Minuti, who's a product manager on the ARVR team working on Blocks, Poly, and Tour Creator. So, I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, generally, Google tends to be all about information and knowledge, and They're trying to capture all of the information in the world and be able to present it to you. And I think that when it comes to education, it's a natural fit for Google to start to take what's essentially a knowledge graph and figure out all these different tools to be able to translate that knowledge graph into these different educational experiences. So this is actually one of the areas that I think that I'm the most excited about for where this goes for Google, especially if there's some uptake when it comes to teachers. I think access to the technology is probably one of the biggest barriers to be able to actually deploy these out into the classrooms. And so it sounds like they have some partnerships with people like Best Buy that have these, what's essentially like an AV cart with a bunch of phones that are AR enabled as well as these VR headsets. So once the technology is in the hands of these teachers, then one of the things that, you know, when I was at the IEEE VR back in 2017, I had a chance to go to a K through 12 education workshop, which actually had some people from Google that were presenting some of their research findings. And what they found is that it's actually better to just create a generic experience of some sort of like concept without trying to specify it for any specific audience. And so You want to be able to take what's essentially like an experience, a visual metaphor of some concept, and then be able to use it for first graders and fifth graders and high school. And it's kind of, in some sense, independent for the grade level, because if it's specified at the grade level, then they will only use it for that grade level. The thing about VR and AR is that you can create these generalized experiences and that they can create this direct experience of some of these concepts so that you've in some ways be able to set the primary metaphors that are going to allow you to understand these mental models and these different maps of different dimensions of reality. So there's these different category schemas in our mind that are essentially like these buckets and categories to be able to file information to. And so a thing about VR is that it gives you the spatial metaphor that really creates these buckets in your brain in a way that can categorize information that is so much more effective than just talking about the abstract construct without having any sort of context for it. So I think VR is going to have this huge application, especially when it comes to these concepts of embodied cognition. You're going to be able to have a direct experience of something. You're going to sort of get the overview of these concepts. And then the teacher is going to be able to share these larger concepts about these ideas. Or also what has been happening with a lot of these things is that the students start to teach each other. And so the student becomes a teacher to other people. As they figure something out, then they get to share that to other people. The selfie sticks seems to be a way that you're able to both get this increased level of embodiment I know last year at Google IO some of the demos that they were showing they were using these selfie sticks and you're able to just get this deep sense of presence of that I don't know there was something about being able to have it far away from your face and be able to walk around that allowed you to have more of a clear window into these augmented reality worlds and so I it sounds like that a lot of these tools are going to be launching with AR features as well and so they're going to be leveraging a lot of these aspects of ARCore that are kind of built into some of these phones and that you know to a certain extent I think that AR may be a little bit better and easier for these educational applications just because once a student goes unveiled within a VR headset then it's difficult to have a social interaction with them at that point and that so much of the learning is socially constructed and seeing what other people are saying and that if it's in AR, then you have a little bit better of a social cohesion within a group of students. So I expect that a lot of these educational things will be in AR first for these groups and areas, but there will actually be some topics that you will need to want to have the full immersion of the virtual reality. And I think the virtual tours are also very exciting to see where this goes, and to have this pipeline within Poly. It was originally just to kind of share these blocks and Tilt Brush, but what Britt Manute said was that people started to essentially upload these entire scenes, and so they kind of took that as a sign that they can start to you know, take these entire virtual tours, put a 360 photo in there and start to annotate it and have like different audio and basically create an audio tour with this stack of web tools, essentially, so that you can upload it to Poly and then you get this URL. And once you have the URL, then that can be sent around. And that is something that you could use to target these different applications that can load dynamically. And you don't have to necessarily download a specific app. although I think you know one of the things that they try to create with the Google expeditions was to Create it so that if you do have like really poor Wi-Fi or for you completely off the grid Then you can still be able to pre download stuff beforehand and then be able to share it to the students So I'm not sure exactly how that's gonna work with the you know URLs and be able to dynamically load stuff But it sounds like they're creating a system so that it can work both online and offline I asked about what kind of business models they have in terms of whether you'll be able to sell these types of things. And talking to different VR artists, one of the feedback they have for Poly is that, well, it'd be really nice if you can actually sell some of my models that I'm creating here. They have Creative Commons integration, which is awesome and great. And that is really encouraging the ability to essentially create these open repositories of art that people are creating from a user-generated perspective, but have a mechanism by which they can share them out and have people just use them. you're able to contribute to this larger repository of educational experiences that can be created if you create something to put up on Polly, either through Tilt Brush or through Blocks. But at the same time, Google at the launch didn't launch with something where they had the store mindset in mind. It wasn't a top priority for them to make it available for the creators to be able to make a living off of this. It just wasn't a top priority in their minimum viable product. And it also just generally, as Google does, they sort of put things out there and let you kind of figure it out on your own. It's kind of like YouTube is a decentralized platform where, you know, if you get to the point where you get a huge audience and people actually clicking on ads, then you can really make a go of it as a living. But at that point, then you kind of become susceptible to the whims of the algorithm for the ads. And so It's kind of like this interesting dynamic where Google is enabling a lot of people to create all this stuff, but at the same time, the economic models to really make it fully sustainable, I think, is something that, without thinking about that, we'll see how far it can really go. It's basically relying upon people's free labor to be able to generate these different types of educational products, which is great if you want to help support these types of educational experiences. But if you want to make a huge living off of it, then I think it's something where you have to find other revenue streams or grants or ways to really sustain yourself in doing that. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast that is an educational resource for you and the rest of the community, and if you want to support that and help keep it going, then you can support me on Patreon by becoming a member at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
