Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

The interface for the online tour, designed to look like a student desk covered with Earlham promotional materials, has a number of built-in features in addition to the tour.

RICHMOND, Ind. — Just in time for the holiday season, Earlham College has added an exciting new feature to its Web site: a virtual tour of the campus at www.earlham.edu/tour. Adding a new dimension to Earlham's online presence, the highly interactive tour uses advanced computer modeling, graphics and Flash streaming technology to provide site visitors an exceptional experience.

Built by the creative dynamos of 361 Studios of Columbus, Ohio, the interactive campus tour is aimed at helping prospective students visit the campus from the comfort of home. The tour combines an abundance of information about campus culture with extensive details about facilities. Beginning with introductory video clips featuring alumna Aili McGill '04, the tour is focused on getting its visitors involved with the campus.

From the main menu, visitors can choose "Destinations," a menu which organizes campus buildings into such categories as "Learning," "Living and Socializing" and "Public Spaces," among others. Another choice, "Tell Me About Earlham" leads the visitor to three video vignettes that describe the College's history, campus culture and student life. At the "Photo Gallery" visitors can view an exhibit of photographs that will grow and change over time. "Meet the Tour Guides" introduces visitors to seven student tour guides, who provide the narration for the descriptions of campus buildings. Finally, the main menu offers links to the Earlham WebCam with its current image of The Heart or center of campus, Richmond and Wayne County, and the Admissions Office.

"Coming up with an attractive online recruiting tool was an important goal of the virtual tour project," said Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jeff Rickey. "With about one third of our applications arriving online, we know that's where students like to get their college information.

"We definitely wanted to include interaction with students as a part of the virtual tour," Rickey continued. "Hearing from current students makes an actual campus tour very meaningful to prospective students. We wanted to extend that to the virtual tour as much as we could."

And even though scripts were provided to the virtual tour guides, students also had a chance to add their own words. "Earlham students have their own opinions of things and wanted the language to sound realistic," said Adam Putnam '07, who is now assistant to the president. "I think the best thing about the virtual tour is that you can fly around and visit campus like you were walking there — except you can be in your living room."

Tour guide Kate Ünver, a senior from Istanbul, Turkey, commented in an e-mail message, "The site looks AMAZING — I'm so proud to be a part of it!"

The crowning part of the tour project is the interactive campus map. "The map was a huge undertaking, requiring that every building – nearly 100 of them – be drawn from all four directions," said Phil Wilson, president and CEO of 361 Studios. Each building was then added to a database along with corresponding files for still photos and audio and video clips. As the audio is delivered, a head shot of the tour guide speaking pops up. Visitors can access campus locations from the legend or by clicking on each structure on the map, and the map itself can be viewed from different perspectives.

"Our international students will really enjoy and benefit from the virtual tour," comments Director of International Admissions Musa Khalidi. "With 10 percent of the student body coming from nearly 70 countries, being able to tour the campus in person is not always possible. The tour will give our international students a very good idea of what they'll find when they arrive at Earlham."

"From our point of view, the most outstanding feature of the tour is the 3-D interactive map of campus," said Wilson. "The interactive map allows visitors to view the campus from four different perspectives, zoom in and out and navigate through the campus by clicking and dragging the map with a mouse." Nearly every area of campus can be clicked-on to view streaming video presentations, many of which are narrated by Earlham students.

"I'm very proud of this project," says Wilson. "Our staff really got into it and came up with additional features as we went. Even the elements on the home page screen are interactive."

Earlham will be distributing 10,000 copies of the virtual tour on CD-ROM to prospective students. The online version of the tour, however, has been designed to easily evolve when there are changes in campus geography or building function.

"Not only is this unlike anything I've seen in a college virtual tour," says Bryan Coalt, director of Web management and services at Earlham, "it's a brilliantly functional product.

"361 Studios built exactly what we presented to them and much more," Coalt continued. "They created a product that we'll be able to keep up to date for years, while pouring immense amounts of their own creativity and innovative ideas into it. It looks fantastic and is an exciting addition to our Web site."

Contact:
Mark Blackmon, director of media relations
765/983-1256 — E-Mail Mark