Today is the day of the release of the 360 Virtual Tour project we have been working on for the last few months.

You can see it here.

The basis of this project was to enable prospective students who are not able to make it to open days to view our facilities inside and outside of the faculty. A hugely challenging project where we had to identify the best tools for the job and then learn how to use these new tools in the most efficient way. Another large part of this work was not only identifying key areas within the faculty and around the campus but gaining permission to capture these areas.

The central media team were kind enough to lend us their GoPro Omni, a cube shaped frame with 6 GoPro Hero’s attached pointing in every direction.

To stitch all of these images together we used a piece of software called Autopano Giga by Kolor. A powerful piece of software with plenty of tools to ensure the best possible stitch, however all shots needed some kind of touching up in Photoshop afterwards.

Then to create the tour we used a piece of software called 3DVista. Another powerful tool with great developer support and almost weekly updates bringing not only bug fixes but new features with it.

Finally all of this was wrapped up in a responsive website enabling users to access from any device (including VR such as Oculus).