Chinese start-up Aha School offers VR museum tours to kids
Edtech start-up Aha School has produced a VR broadcast that offers Chinese children a tour of ten world-famous museums. The feed includes live-streamed commentary from Chinese academics, animations, and clips from Chinese presenters' visits to the museums. The families of 180,000 children each paid Aha School the equivalent of $2.85 to watch the broadcast. The company will also donate the footage to 174 rural classrooms as a public service.
HONG KONG — Last weekend: the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. By Wednesday: the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

And that’s just the half of it.

Children from more than 180,000 Chinese households are on a virtual tour this week of 10 famous museums. The two-hour daily broadcasts combine slick animations, clips from Chinese presenters’ recent trips to the museums and live-streamed commentary from Chinese academics in a Shanghai studio.

The families each paid Aha School, an education start-up based in Shanghai that produced the shows, the equivalent of $2.85 to watch, and the company is donating the broadcast feed to 174 rural classrooms as a public service.

“The children here don’t have access to any museums, let alone famous ones,” Ma Xiaoyan, a teacher at the Akeli Center School in a rural corner of the southwestern province of Sichuan, said by telephone. “For many of them, even going to the closest town is difficult because their families don’t have money for travel.”