We are offering some training in person, to give you more in-depth skills in using our new VR/AR kits. But to give you a quick overview of the possibilities of these kits, we invite you to join the free webinar from ClassVR.

Register here!

This webinar will be Wed, Nov 13 at 9:30am. ClassVR will email you with instructions.

The webinar will last for about an hour. The first section will give you some basics, then take questions. Then they will talk about some of the other features of the headsets and portal, for you to try.

If you want to borrow a kit (or two) for your school for a month, apply here!

We have all kinds of information about using the kits in your school, and are adding more all the time, so keep checking back.

And we would love to see you at a November training session we are doing! We will be in St Cloud at our HQ on Tue Nov 5; and at the Cambridge Public Library on Friday Nov 8. Each session starts at 9:30, and we will provide lunch.

Register here, so we know to expect you.

We will be offering more training sessions in late January/early February – dates TBA.

If you’d like to meet us at this event,
please RSVP below!

On Thursday, Oct. 24th Shena McAuliffe will give a public reading at Upper Gorecki at the College of St. Ben’s at 7pm. CMLE members, we can meet and attend this event together!

From the St. Ben’s website: Shena McAuliffe grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado. Her novel The Good Echo won the Big Moose Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. Her stories and essays have been published in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, True Story, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

We are big fans of VR! Starting this year we have several VR/AR kits we are loaning to our school libraries, complete with lesson plans they can use to connect classes with all kinds of great resources.

Sure, it’s fun to play with these. But virtual and augmented reality is playing an increasingly important role in a lot of other areas. We are going to look at a different use each week, so you can work with your community members to help them learn about the great things possible for them today, and tomorrow.

This week, we have a very cool story about a shipwreck that you can explore yourself in virtual reality!

I think this is going to be one of the real benefits of VR to all of us – we are going to have the the opportunity to experience things and to see things that we would never otherwise experience and see! What a fantastic future we have to look look forward to enjoying!!

Watch the video, read the excerpt below, and click on the link to read the entire thing. (Note: the video would look a LOT cooler if you were watching it with our VR headsets!)

Take a Virtual Tour of a 17th-Century Shipwreck

A new VR experience lets users explore the “Melckmeyt” without diving into Iceland’s freezing waters

“In October 1659, the Dutch merchant vessel Melckmeyt was preparing to sail from Iceland to Amsterdam when a violent storm hit. Crew members, one of whom died in the process, spent two days trying to stop the ship from sinking, but their efforts were in vain. The Melckmeyt, still loaded with cargo, plunged to the bottom of the frigid waters off Iceland’s Flatey Island, where the surviving crewmen were stranded for the winter.

Local divers first discovered the remnants of the wreck in 1992, Mindy Weisberger reports for Live Science. Though much of the ship had decayed over the centuries, its 108-foot lower hull was incredibly well preserved. Now, to mark the 360th anniversary of the Melckmeyt’s demise, archaeologists have launched a virtual reality experience that lets users explore the wreckage as it appears today—and see how the ship might have looked in the days after it sank.

Those in Iceland can stop by the Reykjavik Maritime Museum to tour the Melckmeyt (Dutch for “milkmaid”) with a VR headset. Individuals further afield can use a VR headset, computer or smartphone to experience the wreckage via an interactive YouTube video.

Users explore the ship as a diver, clicking and dragging to move around the archaeological site. The three-minute video begins by panning over the Melckmeyt’s ruins as seen today; labels offer identifying details on various parts of the ship. Then, the scene pivots to a reconstruction of what the Melckmeyt, a type of Dutch vessel known as a flute, might have looked like when it landed on the sea floor in 1659. Keep an eye out for a reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid,” which appears on the similarly named ship’s stern at minute 1:58.”