Features Available in a Unified or Custom Approach

1. Guided Tours. You can use students, faculty, staff, parents, and other groups to guide students, parents, vendors, and visitors around campus in a defined pattern. This helps to give people with no initial direction a way to feel comfortable before they start to explore on their own. If a map is a portion of your overall tour, the guide can use the map as a navigational metaphor and reference. These guides comment on the different topics, majors, programs, etc, that may be described throughout your campus. Their commentary available both from tour driven by a specific guide, and also available when the user use freely exploring the topics and programs (multiple guides' commentary is available per-topic/program). Guides generally each lead distinct tours of campus - in other words each guide will focus on a slightly different aspect of the institution, allowing visitors to self-select the tour that best suits them. (more)
    
2. Topical Collections within Buildings. While each of your buildings has its own unique history and aesthetics, it also has activities that are performed within it, and purposes for which it exists. By describing these “topics” within buildings, you are able to allow your web visitors to explore both topically and geographically. Different buildings of the same type (dormitories, for instance) need the same kind of topic discussion. The basic building block of any unified tour concept is the topic (granular information repository). Majors and programs are more or less classified as topics.
    
3. Interactive Map. While they have been recently downplayed by marketing and tour-making authorities, they are nonetheless the most prevalent form of "tour" on the internet today. If your website already includes a map, it is relatively painless to make it interactive though its inclusion in the tour. It is certainly a feature that many prospective students enjoy exploring--not to mention new students and alumni. It allows you to separate your topical programs from the physical establishments where they reside. The current implementation of our map engine includes a multi-layer and directions system that allows for deep-linking to specific layers (related to events) as well as build-to-building or place-to-place directions. The interactive map is addressable by guides, the map itself, interconnected panoramic images, building and site listings, and categorical listings.
    
4. Interconnected Panoramic Images & FastWalk. By taking panoramic images at strategic points around campus, you are able to create a web of interconnected paths that allow a web visitor to literally walk around campus and get a good idea of his or her surroundings before ever stepping foot on the campus. FastWalk is a methodology that provides visual continuity between panoramic jumps so that the user has a sense of distance.
    
5. Diaries/Blogs. Follow the lives of students, faculty, and others in a periodically updated web log of text, photos, and other media that help reveal what the true institution is all about. This is a way to supplement guided tours with more in-depth life-related information about guides, or about people who are not guides. Faculty members who are listed under a given course a major can have diaries associated with them. Staff that are associated with topics may have diaries of their own.
    
6. Timeline. Make the history and future of your institution come alive with an interactive timeline. A timeline by itself can be uninspiring to non-alumni constituent groups, but one that is tied to current and future programs, people, and events, is a energetic alternate expression of information. Timelines aren't limited to single paths throughout the history of your institution--they can include master plans, strategic plans, segmented periods in history, giving-related information, etc. A timeline is an extremely versatile display methodology. There are many different ways to display the passage of time: from simple lists to 3D perusals of interrelated time.
    
7. Majors/Programs. While "topics" technically can include majors/programs, by adding some specificity, we can better connect relevant information. Majors/minors/programs each have a general descriptions, courses, requirements, and faculty. Each may have multimedia content associated with it.
    
8. Events. It takes a special institutional effort to be able to execute an events aspect to a tour. Events interrelate with a Timeline, Diaries, Topics, Majors, and Buildings. They allow you to represent the media from an event in a way that gives greater depth to users looking through the tour for other purposes OR exposes viewers interested in events to other aspects of the tour. Many whole-site CMS's don't include an events feature, and as such, this can be a cost-effective way to represent the media from events on a website within the tour or as free-standing event-views.
    
9. Linear Presentations. While not actually a distinct view or perspective of the overall tour, Linear Presentations serve two different roles: a) as a media type (like video, photos, audio, or text), and b) as an independent way to collect media from within the tour together for external display. Linear presentations can exist outside the tour, just as video and audio can, in the form of a specialized player. These linear introductions or surveys are useful for marketing campaigns, fundraising campaigns, event summaries, or simple introductions. When represented within the tour, you can use linear presentations to give visual identity to a narration that deals with multiple visual topics. Linear Presentations also allow colleges to create presentations with narration, music and panning photographs that resemble "the Ken Burns effect."
    
10. Interactive Video Teasers. Video is becoming more and more prevalent as a medium for college and university tours, yet the format remains mired in its television legacy as a largely "canned experience." CampusTours is working with several clients to create a new style of video that we have dubbed "Interactive Video." Interactive Videos run just like normal videos, but contain graphical teasers below or to the side of the main video window that appear on cue with portions of the video to tease visitors to click them and escape the "canned" video experience. These Interactive Video Teasers are content managed in the CampusTours MultiMedia Engine, allowing schools to add them dynamically to precise points in their videos. Schools simply choose the exact timeframe in the video when a topic is discussed, and dynamically insert a teaser which links to a complete interactive section about that topic with additional videos, photos, panoramas, commentary, text, etc.
     
11. Exploratory Projects Archive. Bring the activities, crafts, research, and thoughts of your students alive by showcasing it through Rich Media. This resource can work hand-in-hand with a diary/blog feature, allowing students and faculty to directly demonstrate the uses of their time. Portfolio projects, outcomes of research, art exhibits, etc, can be part of this feature.
     
12. Independent Media Player. As you integrate more and more multimedia content into your virtual tour system, the ability to create and showcase customized collections of media outside the tour interface becomes important. CampusTours now offers a simple add-on component to our tours called the Independent Media Player/Publisher system which allows schools to collect media items from within the tour into media collections for display on portions of the college Website. The Independent Media Player is a Flash media player that can be embedded into pages or lauched as a popup, and will play videos, audio clips, display photographs, create slideshows and more. Colleges simply use the MultiMedia Engine to select particular media items (say all the videos of student jazz performances from 2006) and publish them into a single independent media player. A dynamic URL is generated when a collection is published and simply inserting that URL into the college Web site as a link from any page (or embedded into the page) launches the player and the customized collection of media. Several schools are beginning to use this tool to create an ongoing library of multimedia content and performances.

Each feature mentioned is both distinct and inseparably connected to the other information that can be contained in an overall presentation/application—because it all contributes to describing the essence of your institution. Each builds on the information contained within others to make the tour a more in-depth experience.