The traditional college virtual tour tends to be an overhead clickable map; a far different experience from a real world tour experience. After the Google Streetview Trike visited RIT, the Undergraduate Admissions office set out to create an immersive and interactive tour experience.
The panoramic imagry from Streetview will allow users to explore the campus from a unique perspective. Student tour guides provide narration, describing the area of campus a user is viewing. Social media streams, photos, videos, and foursquare information that is related to the geographical area is overlayed throughout the tour. Viewers have the option to just sit back and let the tour run through, or interact by panning and zooming the streetview window, viewing the related media, and jumping to different areas of campus to explore.
An open source Mozilla project called popcorn.js was used as a foundation; and thru HTML 5 the tour is compatible with mobile devices such as the iPad. Future iterations of the tour will incorporate more related media and include more tour nodes. A choose your own adventure type option will be included to allow people to make a customized tour such as an RIT Engineering Tour, or art on Campus tour.
