Discovery VR Unveils Trio of Educational Experiences

Discovery VR has produced the educational virtual reality experiences Racing Extinction: Project Conservation, The Hive Game and The Hive 360 video.

Racing Extinction: Project Conservation and The Hive Game have launched on Samsung GearVR headsets in alignment with National Education Week. Racing Extinction: Project Conservation marks the premiere of interactive experiences on the Discovery VR GearVR app. It offers up-close-and-personal encounters with elephants, tigers, giraffes, lions, rhinoceroses, manta rays, whale sharks and reef sharks, and teaches users about their fight against extinction.

The Hive Game is an interactive endless-runner game available as a stand-alone app in the Oculus Store, as well as on GearVR. The game tests players’ skills at being a productive member of a beehive.

The Hive 360 video, meanwhile, will launch next week. It takes viewers inside the world of bees and beekeepers. Additionally, the Discovery VR app is being updated across all platforms and will feature new navigation, search and download capabilities.

“For Discovery, education and conservation are core to our mission,” said Rebecca Howard, the senior VP of emerging platforms and partnerships at Discovery. “As Discovery continues to lead the way in creating stories for emerging platforms, interactive experiences will progressively become a necessary storytelling tool to further engage, educate and entertain audiences. The Discovery VR team worked closely with Oculus and their guidance was invaluable in developing these experiences for their platform.”

“The ability for VR to impact education is one of the most promising use cases for the technology,” added Tina Tran, the head of educational content at Oculus. “VR provides unique opportunities for learning, exploration and discovery with a perspective that cannot be achieved in any other medium.”

“Virtual reality content has the unique ability to create immersive learning experiences that transport students beyond the four walls of the classroom to experience people, places and ideas they might not otherwise see,” commented Amy Gensemer, Discovery Education’s director of science instruction. “For example, Discovery’s virtual reality content focusing on urban bee populations helps students anywhere explore the unique role these insects play in our shared environment. It’s engaging learning opportunities like these that spark students’ natural curiosity and encourage further investigation of the world around them.”

Alexa Verveer, the senior VP of public policy, corporate and government affairs for Discovery Communications, remarked, “Virtual reality is a great way to bring unique experiences, like seeing tigers, elephants, and giraffes in their natural habitats, to all citizens, including government officials and NGOs. These VR experiences can raise awareness and provide insight that might not otherwise be readily available, and can be helpful to developing global best practices and policies. The importance of protecting wildlife and conservation becomes more tangible when facts and context can be explored in this meaningful way.”