We’ve been using 360 capture to showcase our accommodation for a couple of years now, but it was only this year that we realised that they could be a great way of letting students into our academic facilities too.
Our colleagues in academic departments are pretty proud of the facilities on offer to students and rightly so – our campus has everything from a robotics lab to fully equipped TV studios.
One of the biggest challenges we have in Marketing is working out how to tell students about these awesome places. Lists of text don’t really do them justice, and taking pictures of them can take lots of time without really capturing what makes them so special. Videos sometimes work, but they don’t give the prospective student a chance to get into every nook and cranny of a room of building.
Trialling the 360: the Clinical Simulation Unit in the Department of Health Sciences
Earlier this year, a colleague in Health Sciences had seen the 360 captures we’d done for our accommodation and thought it might work for their Clinical Simulation Unit. It seemed like an obvious choice.
The CSU is made especially for student nurses and midwives. It has a huge range of equipment, and different rooms to simulate environments that students might find themselves in: a bedsit for home visits, an intensive care unit and a hospital ward.
It’s indispensable to the Department’s students, providing a safe place for them to perfect skills and techniques before going out into the community on placements.
It turns out that capturing a 360 visual of a space is really easy if you have the right kit. We borrowed a special camera from the AV team and after only half an hour of training we were ready to go.
Capturing the space took less than an hour, and once it has processed it only took about half an hour to get everything ready for publish.
We’re really proud of the outcome, and think it’s one of the best ways we’ve found to show off our great facilities yet.
Great to see this being used for academic purposes. It’s possible to also make these interactive, as shown in this Cardiff example (https://dermy.org/owen/360Demo/). The xerte popups used in this example are using a system called Xerte, which we have at Uni of York. Do tell academics to get in touch if they are interested in pushing this area further.