The History and Evolution of Virtual Campus Tours
Is a virtual tour of a college or university simply a journey through its’ buildings and facilities? How do you best tell the story of a complex educational institution to those considering attending? What is the proper role of the virtual tour in the overall college admissions process?
At CampusTours we believe that virtual tours are essentially about storytelling. Because colleges and universities are complex organizations with dynamic communities, each school needs to tell its story in their own way. For some schools telling the story of the institution in the course of a walking tour of facilities still works well. However, lately schools are reworking their presentations to appeal to the distinct interests of their visitors, including more content about the experience of attending the school and much more student commentary. As one student in a focus group put it “the buildings look great. But the buildings always look great. What I want to know is what is it like to go there? What’s it like to attend [the school] as a student?”
The Virtual Campus Tour Timeline
| 1994 | The first virtual tours appear. Most tours follow the traditional walking tour model, showcasing the institution through an exploration of its buildings and facilities. | ||
| 1996 | Photographic Tours – Stop based tours approximating the actual campus tour are introduced. These tours contain text, photos, and in the most sophisticated cases, QuickTime™, IPIX™ or JAVA™ panoramic images. | ||
| 1997 | CampusTours.com founded, begins categorizing virtual tours (see CampusTours in the WayBackMachine). | ||
| 1998 | Photographic Tours with Guide Narration – Stop based tours narrated by a tour guide gain popularity. These tours are generally comprised of a series of photos with directional arrows giving users different choices as they navigate the campus. Audio narration for each “stop” is often provided by a tour guide, visually represented by a photo. In some cases a campus map is also present to provide the visitor with a sense of the layout of campus. | ||
| 1999 - 2000 | Panoramic Tours – Panoramic tours exploded onto the college market starting in 1999. Panoramic tours are a good complement to the traditional walking tour, and give visitors the capability to immerse themselves in a college scene. Some panoramic tours offer an accompanying campus map, and others include narration. A number of panoramic image formats emerged introducing users to IPIX™, QuickTime™ and JAVA™ viewers. | ||
| 2001 | CampusTours begins building virtual tours for colleges and universities. | ||
| 2003 - 2004 | Video Tours – In 2003 the first video tours begin to emerge on college Web sites. Initially colleges simply provide a digitized version of their five to ten minute promotional video. | ||
| 2005 | CampusTours Unveils MultiMedia Engine Virtual Tour Content Management System. The first version of the MultiMedia Engine supports fully content-managed tours comprised of photos, narration, music, videos, animation and interactive maps. | ||
| 2006 | Themed Video Tours – Colleges begin to move away from showing each and every campus location, and instead refocus the presentation on the experience of attending the institution. The tours are often complemented by an interactive map that gives the ability to explore the campus. | ||
| 2007 | InteractiveVideo Virtual Tours – CampusTours introduces InteractiveVideo (see InteractiveVideo Sample), a technology that allows universities to add interactive links within videos. InteractiveVideo allows institutions to produce shorter primary videos and encourages visitors to jump off to separate experiences within the video depending on their interests. | ||
| 2008 | Day in The Life Tours - Colleges begin to emphasize student stories in telling the story of the institution. ‘Day In The Life’ or ‘Year In The Life’ experiences offer the visitor an inside look at several students daily lives. | ||
| 2008 | CampusTours debuts StatFrame Tour Traffic Tracking service. StatFrame allows institutions to monitor every user tour session independently, providing valuable feedback for modifying the tour with the MultiMedia Engine Version 5. | ||
| 2009 | Tours with Student Commentary – Colleges begin to add student commentary to tours, augmenting official tour videos with commentary clipped from students on the same topic. (See Commentary Sample) | ||
| 2010 | Mobile Device Tours - Colleges roll out mobile-optimized tours for devices ranging from phones and handhelds to tablets. | ||
| 2011 and beyond | Personalized Tour Experiences - Colleges are readying the first round of personalized tour experiences which substantially alter the tour based on user choice and preferences, and report their session information back into Student Information Systems for detailed admissions tracking. | ||