About CampusTours

CampusTours.com was created in 1997 as a worldwide Web directory of virtual college tours. In 1999 CampusTours was acquired and rolled into the diverse college company College Enterprises Inc./iCollege Inc, and in 2000 iCollege Inc was acquired by the course software company Blackboard Inc (NASDAQ: BBBB). In 2001 CampusTours was spun out as a separate company as Blackboard made preparations for an initial public offering. CampusTours subsequently moved most operations to Auburn, Maine where it is located today as a private company.

CampusTours Productions

In 2002 CampusTours began creating virtual tours for colleges and universities nationwide through the CampusTours Productions branch of the company. Initially tours were constructed as stand-alone multimedia presentations, but as clients demanded a robust tool to control and revise the presentations, the CampusTours MultiMedia Engine was born. The CampusTours MultiMedia Engine is now in its fourth generation, and has recently been upgraded from a simple client-based software application to a much more robust enterprise-capable Web-administered application. The MultiMedia Engine is currently the only Adobe Flash content management application designed specifically for academic virtual tours, interactive maps and multimedia presentations.

The MultiMedia Engine

An extremely powerful and infinitely configurable piece of software, the MultiMedia Engine is a unique content management application in that it is continually redesigned in order to conform to the designs, concepts and functional specifications of the rich media applications that CampusTours clients demand. Not only does the MultiMedia Engine give institutions direct control over every aspect of their presentation, it includes features and entire modules specifically designed for academia including:

• Interactive Map Engine provides full content management features to any existing or newly created rendering of campus. Features include the ability to import new map graphics at any time, automatic resolution image slicing using Zoomify technology, define, edit or remove hotspots, link hotspots to any size collection of media including videos, photos, text etc., search map topics and buildings, infinite graphical layers capability (show emergency call boxes, dormitories, place icons for parking, essentially any graphic overlay), gesture control, print map in current state, zoom/pan, map inlay control and more.
• LinearTour Engine provides an intuitive interface for creating and editing complex Flash animations comprised of background music and/or narration coupled with photographic animation and/or video. Best described as "Ken Burns" presentations, LinearAnimations give schools with limited budgets a powerful tool for creating compelling narrated photographic animations and video montages. The LinearTour Engine gives schools the full capability to edit, extend or even create new animations at any time at no additional cost.
• InteractiveVideo Technology gives schools the ability to create depth behind institutional overview videos. InteractiveTeasers animate out of the videos to alert users to additional content pertaining to the topic currently being discussed in the video.
• CoordinatedVideo Technology allows institutions to easily and inexpensive remove and update virtual tour guides, without requiring re-shooting of all b-roll or tour content video. By separating the tour guide commentary video from the content video and providing robust content management of both video streams and even the coordination between them, CoordinatedVideo Technology ensures that your guided tour can be kept up to date without needing to be entirely re-created every year.
• StatFrame Tour Traffic Tracking Service is the only rich media traffic analytics tool that can report on the complex behavior of Flash Rich Media Applications. With StatFrame you will know what's being viewed - and what's not - in your tour.

Technical Requirements

The MultiMedia Engine system has recently been upgraded from a simple client software application to a robust enterprise-capable Web application. The content management portion of the application is now Web-based and can be accessed from any industry standard Web browser. The MultiMedia Engine content management system generally resides on a server inside the university firewall (not the public Web server), and requires:

• Sun GlassFish Application Server or Apache/Tomcat
• MySQL 4.1 or higher
• 10GB of free disc space
• 2GB of RAM or higher

Web Server Requirements

There are no specific server requirements in order to serve MultiMedia Engine based presentations.  The only files that are located on the server are a series of runtime files including JPEGs, SWFs, PNGs, MP3s, FLVs, and XML files.  Since each presentation is dynamically assembled from a XML data repository, there is no requirement for a database layer, no additional programs, scripts or processes that must be run on the server. 

• Windows, UNIX, LINUX or SOLARIS servers, running Apache, IIS, Solaris, SUN OS, etc.
• Depending on the quantity of information present in the tour, between 15MB and 80MB of disk space will be required