Tomorrow we’re going to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. My daughters have been looking forward to it for weeks! The giraffes are what they are most excited to see. This morning my youngest daughter asked to see pictures of giraffes. What she really meant was that she wanted to see augmented reality giraffes in our house. She knew that was a possibility because of our little platypus exploration last winter. So we spent a little time looking at augmented reality giraffes this morning in anticipation of tomorrow’s trip to the zoo.  

Here’s a little video of a giraffe in our dining room. 

How to Create Videos of Augmented Reality Animals

To create the videos of augmented reality animals in my house I simply did a Google search for them on my Pixel 5 then chose the “view in your space” option to have the animals rendered in AR. Once the animals were rendered in AR I then just held down the record button that appears on the screen when viewing an AR object via Google mobile search. The video automatically saves to the phone and from there you can share it anywhere including YouTube and Instagram. 

The whole process of making a video with augmented reality videos might sound complicated, but it’s not. I demonstrated the whole process in this short video. 

Applications for Education

I use the augmented reality animals in Google mobile search to feed my daughters’ curiosities and interests in animals that they otherwise wouldn’t see except in a zoon. For slightly older kids think making videos of augmented reality animals could be a fun way to have students record short videos about animals and explain how why they would or wouldn’t do well outside of their natural environment. Students can also stitch together a series of the short videos to tell a story about the animals. For example, I can envision creating an entire story about the adventures of a giraffe wandering through my neighborhood.