I spearheaded The Virtual Hike of the Wintergreen Gorge project, which began in February 2021 and continued through June 2021. The roots of this project began in other VAR Lab work I was engaged in on campus that included building engaging campus tours. After word spread of my work, I was approached by the Assistant Director of Alumni Relations and informed of Behrend’s plans to participate in Penn State’s We Are Week 2021.
We Are Week is an annual series hosted by Penn State to engage with Alumni and the community. In a typical year, the events would be hosted exclusively at University Park. In the year 2021, the events would have to be hosted virtually to accommodate COVID restrictions. This allowed Behrend the unique opportunity to participate by virtually showcasing a local gem, the Wintergreen Gorge. The difficulty was, no comprehensive, interactive, and high-quality resource was available to showcase the Wintergreen Gorge to an audience in this format. The VAR Lab was the only group on campus with the capability to produce this type of media. So, the job of building this interface fell onto me as a Project Manager with the VAR Lab.
With only a little over four months before the big presentation, I had no outline, no local examples to use as templates, and no starting media. Never had I used, or even known about, the 360-degree hardware and tour-building software that would ultimately make up the backbone of the virtual tour.
In fact, I had to determine the hardware and software that would be used through a rigorous trial process that would take up the first several weeks. It wasn’t until early April that an Insta 360 Pro 2 was finally purchased and delivered.
This kicked off the production phase of the project.
In the ensuing weeks:
- I planned, captured, and processed 360-degree photos around the Wintergreen Gorge and other campus locations.
- I learned the virtual tour-building software and then built the user interface from scratch.
- I determined what accompanying media would be beneficial, delegated the gathering process to project collaborators, and ultimately integrated what they gathered into the final product.
What resulted was:
The Virtual Hike of the Wintergreen Gorge Project. Wintergreen Gorge Virtual Tour (psu.edu)
- A product delivered in time to be showcased at the We Are event on June 21st, 2021. Learn more about this event here. *LINK TO WE ARE POST*
- Upwards of a hundred 12k Adaptive HDR Panoramas give the audience a clear view of the Behrend campuses’ natural landscape.
- A virtual trail network that consists of approximately 2,000 meters of trails with four unique trailhead starting locations.
- An easy-to-navigate user interface that allows users to freely roam around the gorge.
- A valuable collection of information about the gorge that is accessible to users from within the program.
Since the Virtual Hike of the Wintergreen Gorge’s completion, the VAR Lab has further improved its virtual tour-building capabilities and I have personally gained considerable experience in producing programs in this media format. Plans are now in the works to build onto the original Wintergreen Gorge project by expanding the virtual trail network and rebuilding the user interface to improve ease of use and styling.
