I hope your dreams
Don't feel small
And when the wind begins to rise
I hope your mast stands straight and tall
(Pearl, Google Spotlight Stories)
Dreaming and virtual reality are never far apart: both experiences allow us to explore a rich and vibrant imaginary world.
Relatedly, in a joint event with the Girls School, Year 9 teamed up with Google Spotlight to analyse the VR story ‘Pearl, exploring the themes of journeys, family, and growing up.
The boys and girls evaluated the links between traditional storytelling and virtual reality storytelling, analysing virtual realities’ greater capacity for empathy and experience: identifying yourself with the thoughts and emotions of another character became intuitive when you view events through their eyes.
Interestingly, both the boys and girls also raised the problems of non-linearity in VR and the need to watch the film multiple times to grasp the story unfolding around them. After some discussion, we agreed this was a positive aspect of VR, since it allowed for a richness and depth of storytelling not present in traditional media.
The event was a tremendous success and we would like to thank Google’s educational team for offering this wonderful experience. We look forward to future collaboration with Google as we push the project out to other schools as part of our Outreach programme.
We looked at exploring:
- Career Expedition: YouTube Software Engineer, Angelica Inguanzo
- Career Expedition: Victoria Nneji, Human-Robot Interaction Design Researcher
- Evolution of Computers
- Microprocessors
