NYT VR is an app that features over 200 free 360 videos.
These 360 videos provides an immersive VR experience and cover a wide range of topics and experiences. The immersive nature of these 360-degree videos can promote a sense of empathy by allowing students to better understand other peoples’ experiences and curiosity by giving agency for students to explore and make meaning on their own. Many of the videos are 2-3 minutes long so they can be used as a hook at the beginning of a lesson. Here are some interesting ones we found:
- Sensations of Sound: A young woman shares her experience of hearing music for the first time after receiving a cochlear implant
- The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: Through modeling and mapping technologies, witness from above what happened in Hiroshima
- Shakespeare, Under The Sky And Around the Globe
- A French Opera, Acrobats And 18th Century Lovers
- Inside An Abandoned Airport In Greece, A Refugee Camp
- Restoring The 11th Century Temples Of Bagan
- A Family’s Journey Home To Afghanistan And Uncertainty
- At Home With Omar And Sarah, A Syrian Refugee Story
- A Harvest Underneath the Ice: Travel under the ice in 360 with the Inuit who harvest the mussels
- Raising a Possible Pharaoh in Cairo: Step onto the sidelines of an archaeological dig as pieces of a 3,000-year-old statue are excavated
Download the NYT VR app on the phone and view videos with or without a VR headset. The app can also be downloaded on an Ipad which can be shared by a group of students. The app is missing a search option which makes it difficult to find videos. However, we found a playlist on YouTube with all the NYT VR videos so it may be easier simply to sift through the playlist below. We recommend downloading the videos for offline viewing to avoid relying on internet access and to provide smoother playback.