Ealing Children Experience Virtual Reality

A lesson with a difference for Grange primary pupils

Children at Grange Primary School in Ealing have had an exciting lesson in Virtual Reality from a top production company.

The seven and eight-year-olds were visited by the Pebble Studios team at the start of the year and asked to use their imagination to draw characters, lands and stories.

The artworks impressed the team and two weeks later, the studio surprised the children with a VR experience allowing them to step inside their imaginations in virtual reality and explore the three-dimensional worlds inspired by their own sketches.

The virtual world in Pebble Studios’ “Making Kids’ Imagination a Virtual Reality” turned the children’s characters into 2D paper figures set in a simple, bold and colourful world to keep the charm of the children’s original drawings.

The team then animated the drawings, added textures and arranged the characters around a track which a 360 camera followed through the virtual environment.

Matt Beveridge, co-founder and creative director of Pebble Studios, said:

“It’s our job as a creative production agency to be imaginative all day every day, and we make VR experiences for all sorts of industries, but we wanted to remind ourselves what pure, limitless, childhood creativity felt like again.

“Children are great creatives because they use their imagination all the time. Most obviously in the playground, but also in the classroom when picturing past histories or when making sense of new ideas. We’ve had more interest than ever from educational organisations wanting to harness the power of imaginative learning through virtual reality experiences; VR definitely has the potential to be the blackboard of the future. For now, though, we’ve just enjoyed letting kids’ imaginations roam free!”

Emma Aly-Lane, teacher at Grange Primary School, said: “This has been such a fantastic experience for the children, and for me too. I was blown away by their creativeness, fantastic imaginations, and just how articulate they were. It was so refreshing to hear the children letting their imaginations go free and hearing them put their thoughts and ideas into words for the VR team to work from. It was a pleasure seeing them take part in this exciting project.”

The cute and heart-warming video of the project and the big reveal can be viewed here.

Those with a VR headset, or Google Cardboard, can step inside the imagination of a child for themselves here (or just enjoy the world in 2D here without a VR headset).

Learn more about VR at www.pebblestudios.co.uk.

22nd February 2017