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We get a lot of feedback when we ask students what their impression of campus is. The general consensus is they had no idea how large and green it is. Being an urban campus most people think that Wayne State is just a collection of buildings along busy roads. But in reality we are a 400 acre campus with quite a bit of green space and a traditional campus feel.

It's easy to change the impression once someone steps on to campus, but what about the people who can't physically make it here. A few months ago we evaluated our current virtual tour website (left) and found it to fall short of the "immersive experience" we give students who come on a physical campus tour. We set out to change that.

Campus immersion

Bringing campus to life means capturing and showing off as much of campus as possible.We decided on highlighting over 40 areas on campus to provide 360 degree immersions.

We broke the experiences down in to five categories:

• Academics & Research
• Athletics
• Libraries
• Campus Life & Housing
• Medical Campus & Extension Centers

Areas to explore

In addition to the 40 locations the user can explore we also added 60 "hotspots" which show up embedded in the locations. When the user clicks on one they are presented with some text, additional images or a video that explains more.

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Next steps

The result is a landing page that we created that allows a visitor to choose a path and a full screen window opens to allow them to start exploring campus at their own pace. The tour is also available on any iOS device.

We have calls to actions on the landing page and throughout the tour. We are tracking users as they go through the tour, it is still a little too early to tell how effective the new tour is. One thing I can say that it has already surpassed the previous tour as far as engagement and time on site.

View the new virtual tour at: http://virtualtour.wayne.edu/ (opens new window)