Google Expeditions

Google Expeditions
Information
Type	Educational software
Industry	Education
Developer	Google
Operating System	Android, iOS
Supported Devices	Google Cardboard, Google Daydream View, ARCore and ARKit devices
Release Date	September 28, 2015 (Pioneer Program); June 27, 2016 (public Android release)

Google Expeditions was an educational virtual reality and augmented reality app made by Google for classroom "virtual field trips". A teacher acting as the Guide used a phone or tablet to lead students, the Explorers, through 360-degree scenes viewed on smartphones in Google Cardboard viewers, and later through 3D objects placed in the classroom with AR.

Google announced Expeditions at its I/O developer conference in May 2015, ran it as a school pilot called the Expeditions Pioneer Program from September 2015, and released the app publicly for Android in June 2016. A solo mode, AR tours and the companion Tour Creator tool followed in 2017 and 2018. In May 2018 Google said Expeditions had taken more than 3 million students on trips since 2015. Google discontinued the app on June 30, 2021 and moved most of its tours to Google Arts & Culture, where they can be viewed without a headset.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Checked every dated fact, number, name and quote against the cited Google blog posts, archived and live Expeditions help pages, the 2020 Google for Education product page, press reports and the five papers (authors, titles, venues and DOIs via Crossref and OpenAlex). About review dates.

History

Announcement and Pioneer Program (2015)

Expeditions was one of the Google Cardboard announcements at Google I/O on May 28, 2015, where Google also said that Cardboard now worked with 6-inch phones. VentureBeat described the app as a way for a teacher to control what many Cardboard headsets showed at the same time. Its launch partners included The Planetary Society, the Château de Versailles and the American Museum of Natural History, and Google planned the rollout for fall 2015. Engadget reported that a classroom kit held 30 smartphones with Cardboard viewers plus one tablet for the teacher, and that teachers in early trials had used a Verona tour in lessons on Romeo and Juliet and the Great Wall of China to teach estimation.

On September 28, 2015, Google started the Expeditions Pioneer Program for the 2015/2016 school year. Google staff visited schools with kits containing ASUS smartphones, a tablet for the teacher, a router that let Expeditions run without an internet connection, and Google Cardboard or Mattel View-Master viewers. The first countries were Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Teachers could choose from more than 100 trips, including Mars, the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Wall of China, with content from partners such as PBS, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, David Attenborough working with Alchemy VR, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Google also worked with the Starfish Foundation on career-themed tours and with Michelle Obama's Reach Higher initiative on virtual college tours. Subaru provided the cars that carried kits to schools.

Public release (2016)

On June 27, 2016, the app left beta and became a free download on Google Play; UploadVR reported that it ran on Android 4.4 devices and that an iOS version was planned. By then more than one million students in 11 countries had taken part during the pilot, and over 200 expeditions were available. Best Buy Education began selling ready-made Expeditions kits; UploadVR listed a US$9,999 package with 30 student devices, Mattel View-Master viewers, a tablet, chargers, a router and a carrying case.

Solo mode and Daydream support (2017)

On July 19, 2017, Google began rolling out self-guided Expeditions for Android, which let anyone take more than 600 tours alone, with iOS support to follow. The same post said the app also worked with Google Daydream View on Daydream-ready phones. Google suggested that teachers could set tours as homework, and gave as an example a tour about the Hamilton-Burr duel narrated by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The update added an Annotations tool that let a Guide draw on a scene with a finger or stylus, with the drawing appearing at once for every connected Explorer.

Expeditions AR (2017-2018)

At Google I/O on May 17, 2017, Clay Bavor, Google's vice president of virtual and augmented reality, said more than two million students had taken virtual field trips with Expeditions on Cardboard. He announced Expeditions AR, which used Google's Tango platform to place objects such as the Statue of David, a strand of DNA or a Category 5 hurricane in the classroom, through a Pioneer Program starting that fall. 9to5Google named Tango phones such as the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro as the devices for the AR mode.

On May 30, 2018, Google made AR tours available to everyone in the Expeditions app on Android devices that support ARCore and iOS devices that support ARKit. It said one million students had used AR in classrooms during the AR Pioneer Program over the previous school year. At that point the app held more than 100 AR and 800 VR tours. Authors included Google Arts & Culture partners such as the Smithsonian Freer|Sackler, Museo Dolores Olmedo and Smarthistory, and educational publishers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hodder Education, Oxford University Press and Aquila Education. Best Buy Education began selling the first combined Expeditions AR/VR kits the same day.

Tour Creator (2018)

On May 9, 2018, during Teacher Appreciation Week, Google launched Tour Creator, a browser tool for building VR tours from Google Street View imagery or the user's own 360-degree photos. The tool used a drag-and-drop interface with Google Maps as its base, and creators could add their own 2D and 360-degree photos and text points of interest. Finished tours were published to Poly, Google's 3D content library, where they could be opened in a browser, viewed in Google Cardboard or embedded on a school website. Google said it would add the ability to import such tours into Expeditions later that year. By late 2019 the Expeditions help center stated that teachers could add their own Tour Creator tours to Expeditions to guide classes, and that tours liked or shared to Expeditions on Poly appeared in the app automatically. When a Guide opened such user-generated tours, the app warned that they had not been approved by Google.

Discontinuation (2020-2021)

On November 13, 2020, Jennifer Holland, Director of Program Management at Google for Education, announced that Google would stop supporting the Expeditions app and that it would no longer be available to download after June 30, 2021, and that most Expeditions 360 tours were moving to Google Arts & Culture on the web and in its Android and iOS apps. Her post gave this reason: "We've heard and recognize that immersive experiences with VR headsets are not always accessible to all learners and even more so this year, as the transition to hybrid learning has presented challenges for schools to effectively use Expeditions." TechCrunch noted that the news came a little over a month after Google announced it would end support for its Daydream VR platform. Engadget linked the move to Google's retreat from phone-based VR: none of its phones from the Pixel 3a onward supported Daydream View, and in 2019 it had shut down its Spotlight Stories VR studio and the Jump VR platform.

Google deactivated both Expeditions and Tour Creator on June 30, 2021. Its help center states that the apps no longer work on devices and that tours cannot be downloaded again once deleted; it directs users to search for "Expeditions" in Google Arts & Culture instead. As of October 2026, Google Arts & Culture runs an "Arts & Culture Expeditions" page of virtual field trips grouped by themes including science and technology, arts, geography, natural history and history.

Features

Guide and Explorer roles

The app had two roles. The Guide, usually a teacher, chose and downloaded a tour, moved through its scenes or objects and highlighted points of interest; Explorers, usually students, joined the session on their own devices and saw what the Guide sent. Guide and Explorers had to be on the same network. A VR tour was made of 360-degree images called scenes, each with descriptions, talking points and questions for the Guide. The Guide could pause a scene, which froze every Explorer's screen; select a suggested point of interest, which showed Explorers an arrow pointing to it; create a new point of interest by touching and holding a spot; or draw on the scene. Tours were organized under Discover, Library and Class tabs.

In solo mode, a user took a tour alone as an Explorer, with points of interest highlighted, or previewed it in Guide mode before leading a class.

AR tours

AR tours used printed markers placed around the room, often on the floor or on tables. Every marker showed the same 3D object at once, so a class could split into groups around several markers and walk around the object while pointing their device cameras at it. The Guide's view defaulted to a 3D mode that did not need a marker, with an option to switch to AR and pinch to resize the object.

Library size

Google's own figures for the tour library and student reach changed as the program grew:

Date	VR tours	AR tours	Students reached (as stated by Google or press)	Source
September 2015	100+	-	-
June 2016	200+	-	More than 1 million in 11 countries
May 2017	-	-	More than 2 million
July 2017	600+ (solo mode)	-	-
May 2018	800	100+	More than 3 million since 2015
November 2019 (help center)	Over 1,000	100	-
January 2020 (product page)	Over 900	Over 100	-

The November 2019 help page and the January 2020 product page give different VR counts; the product page also said Google and its partners had developed "more than 1,000 VR and AR tours".

Supported devices

Pioneer Program kits used ASUS phones in Cardboard or View-Master viewers, a teacher tablet and a router for offline use. The public app ran on Android and later on iOS, and worked with Google Cardboard and, on Daydream-ready phones, with Daydream View. Google's product page, as archived in January 2020, listed the requirements for VR as the Expeditions app on a mobile device or Chrome OS, with a Cardboard or Daydream viewer as optional. AR tours needed a device supporting ARCore on Android or ARKit on iOS, with a selfie stick as an option. Expeditions kits included teacher and student devices, VR viewers, chargers and a router, in sizes for 10, 20 or 30 students.

Research

Expeditions was studied in education research as a low-cost form of classroom VR.

• Shailey Minocha, Ana-Despina Tudor and Steve Tilling of The Open University described the technological affordances of Expeditions in a paper at the 31st British HCI Conference in 2017, based on what they called a large exploratory study. They discussed how the app supported experiential learning, inquiry-based learning and links between virtual fieldwork and physical field trips. Minocha's project page states that the work was funded by a Google Virtual Reality Research Award, with the Field Studies Council, the Geographical Association and the Association for Science Education as partners.
• Saman Ebadi and Marjan Ebadijalal tested Expeditions with 20 upper-intermediate Iranian learners of English as a foreign language, who role-played as museum guides with or without the app. The group that used Expeditions scored significantly higher in oral performance and willingness to communicate at the end of the experiment.
• In a later study of 42 Iranian learners of English, Marjan Ebadijalal and Nouroddin Yousofi reported that the group exploring places with Expeditions outscored a control group in writing motivation and overall writing performance.
• Antigoni Parmaxi, Androulla Athanasiou and Alan A. Demetriou used Expeditions as a student-led tool in a language classroom under the "teach-back" method and reported on collaboration patterns and students' learning experiences.
• Yevhenii Shapovalov and four co-authors, most of them from the National Center "Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine", reviewed Expeditions and Google Lens as AR tools for STEM education in 2018. They listed obstacles including teachers' lack of awareness of the system, a lack of guidance, and the absence of a Ukrainian-language interface.

See also

• Google Cardboard
• Google Daydream View
• Virtual tour
• Google Street View
• Google Earth VR
• Cardboard Camera