Kenyon: Virtual tour

Our conversations with college students have had a huge impact on the way we think about virtual tours. Everyone’s looking for one— yet they seem to be viewed by most prospective students as “cheesy” and generally not worth the trouble.

So while most of the .edu world seems to be focused on putting together the slickest, most tech-savvy virtual tour around, our intuition is that what students really want is a straightforward, image-driven gallery of campus places, with multimedia elements playing a supporting rather than leading role.

That’s what we are proposing for Kenyon here.

1) We believe your office should begin by identifying all the stops on the campus tour. Certainly you can use the same places that guides point out during the non-virtual tour, though you may want to add some, such as inside a lived-in dorm room, inside the library— maybe the president’s office? And you may want to remove a few, as we don’t need descriptions of EVERY building or field. Probably 15-20 stops on the tour is the right number.

2) For each of these tour stops, your office will identify (with our help) 5-10 nice quality, medium-res photos that give a good sense of the place.

3) We’ll also identify any existing multimedia files that might be connected to any of these places. In our opinion, each stop on the tour ought to have at least one video. Because the images will be leading the way, the quality of the videos isn’t THAT important. Clips can be anywhere from 15 seconds to 2 minutes in length.

4) For a moderate additional fee, we can bring a digital camera to Kenyon on our next visit and shoot some video clips and photographs ourselves as needed. I believe that if we’re looking at the library, for example, and seeing some really nice pictures, all we’d need would be some decently-lit video of a tour guide giving his/her quick spiel on the library.

5) We’ll build a page for each stop on the tour. Each page will be dominated by a gallery of nice-quality, large photographs. Students will be able to click through a series of photos on each page, with nice fade transitions between images. We’ll build everything to load as quickly as possible.

In a secondary but still prominent position, we’ll include space for a video on each page. We will also assist in the conversion of any media files you’ve got into Flash Video (.flv) format, generally understood as the best way to stream video these days (as there are generally no browser-support issues to worry about). If there are audio files, we can include those too. We will create and implement a simple media player to stream these files. (Details on media streaming in a separate recommendation.)

Then the rest of the page can contain descriptive text and links to related sites. We will help you edit copy as needed.

We’re open to several ways of navigating between pages. We can either do a previous/next approach, where you decide the order of pages and we make users go in order; or we can provide a navigation list of all the tour stops and let students decide which they want to see. We’re also willing to tie the navigation to the campus map somehow; for example, maybe you click a map, get a larger version, and mouse around to the tour stop you’re looking for. (The feasibility of that approach depends on where the tour stops are, etc.)

6) If we’re working outside the CMS, we will build all of this out, finishing the tour to completion. We’ll provide instructions for creating additional tour stops in the future.