On my placement year I worked for the HELP CETL (Higher Education Learning Partnerships Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning). At the end of my placement my boss wanted me to look at the best way to help partner college students find their way around the campus when they come for their final year. after some discussions we decided it would be best to create a virtual tour of the camps. I will incorporate some of the tutorials available on the student portal and make them interactive within the virtual tour. Students will also be to input the names of two buildings and the tour will show them the most commonly used routes.
I have been looking at using 3DS Max to recreate the university campus in 3D. Use the maps available to students as starting off points. When the user comes to use the tour for the first time it will be shown zoomed out in an isometric view.
From here users will be able to free roam around the University campus or click on each building to find out more information through the form of text, audio, pictures and video. After speaking with my final year project tutor, he felt that this may not be the best project for me to use (I have been working on another project which i will discuss later). I have been looking at different ways of interacting with the tour to make it more interesting while still being able to keep the main part of the project, the virtual tour of the campus.
Below is two examples of interaction trying to make the tour more immersive. This would be used more when the tour is being shown off to students at open days.
The second idea is to try and represent one of the major buildings from the tour idea (the library) in a completely different way, The main idea for this project is to take data relating to the library and represent it in relationship to the building itself. The data and how it relates to the library and its users has still to be finalized.
One idea is to represent each floor with a heat map. This will show how much each area of the library is used throughout the day.
Another idea is to represent the library like a human skeleton. The structure of the building will represent the building itself while some of the data representing different layers above the skeleton.
