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When visitors tour your campus for the first time, where do you take them?  What do you tell them?  What spaces and stories are you most proud to highlight?

It’s difficult to translate that in-person experience to a flat webpage with simple text and photos. That’s why 360° virtual tours are perfect for schools!

An interactive 360° virtual campus tour enables you to tell your story to students who live far away and can’t take an in-person tour right away (or ever) before making a decision. The fully-spherical panoramas take students inside your classrooms, dorm rooms, sports facilities, performance areas and campus hotspots with the ability to look up, down and all the way around to get a complete view of the space — almost like they were there in person. Plus, you can add video clips, sideshows, text descriptions, voice-overs, and other interactive elements to make the experience even more informative and fun.

Your school’s campus is a special, beautiful place.
Make it shine online.

Point-of-interest tours (POI) vs. walkable tours

Google type virtual tours are “walkable,” meaning the photographer takes a new 360° photo every 15-20 feet, so you can move down a hallway, or “walk” across campus. There are a number of drawbacks to this approach:

  1. At 15-feet apart, many panoramas are essentially the same thing, so you may spend a lot of time clicking on the same sidewalk to get to the next point of interest.
  2. With so many panoramas to take, the photographer can’t take time to:
    • Stage each scene so it looks crisp, clear and amazing
    • Strategically place people around the camera to highlight the campus energy
    • Shoot multiple exposures to ensure you can see both inside the rooms, and out the windows
    • Photoshop any imperfections, remove the tripod, and color-correct the images in post-processing
  3. Most walkable interfaces are template-based or tied to the Google servers, so you cannot customize the look and feel of the experience to your brand identity.
  4. Since all the panoramas are connected in a spider-web fashion, it’s much harder to make changes to your virtual tour if you build a new building or renovate an existing one.
  5. Your audience may accidentally click in the wrong spot and get lost while moving from point A to point B.

Circlescapes tours are point-of-interest based, so we focus on highlighting only the spaces you think are most beneficial to your marketing and admissions efforts. We work with you to stage each scene, arranging people around the camera, and hiding clutter to make each panorama look its best.

We then combine all the panoramas into an easy-to-use, customized interface that is specific to your brand identity and needs. For navigation between panoramas, you can use a campus map, thumbnail images, a drop-down list, or a combination of them. Your online visitors will only see and experience what you want them to see.

This type of virtual tour is compelling because:

  1. Your website is usually the first touchpoint for prospective students and their families—your virtual tour helps your school stand out
  2. You can visually highlight, and quickly access specific programs like the performance arts, athletics or science
  3. Including students and staff in the panoramas highlights the energy of your campus
  4. Compelling interactive content like videos, slideshows, audio and text makes your tour a dynamic marketing piece
  5. Unlike your printed collateral, your virtual tour can be easily and inexpensively updated and can “grow” over time
  6. It is a perfect collateral piece to travel with your enrollment recruiters—it displays on mobile devices, and is an engaging way to introduce your campus to potential students

Why choose Circlescapes?

  • Circlescapes has photographed over 400 venues in 33 states and abroad and has been creating virtual tours for over 10 years
  • Affordable, one-time cost. No monthly or annual fees.
  • It only takes 2-3 weeks to deliver your virtual tour after we finish the photography.
  • Custom-designed interfaces that will reflect your school’s brand—not a template
  • Amazing photography
    • Big, bold, crisp 360° images
    • High dynamic range technique (HDR photography— so you can see both inside the room and the view out the window as your real eye would see it)
    • Staged scenes — with or without people— so your campus will have an appealing energy
    • Detailed post processing to ensure each panorama looks its best (color correction, tripod removal, sharp and detailed, using right combination of people, etc.)
  • Built-in analytics, request-for-information forms, and call to action buttons so your tour can generate leads
  • The ability for you to edit multiple components in-house — like image slideshows, videos and text
  • We can create an affordable VR app for your school, downloadable from Google Play or Apple App store (app vs viewing VR in a web browser is a more functional and smoother viewing experience)
  • We can design and procure custom-branded VR  headsets so you can add this really fun swag to your marketing mix

How much does it cost?

A Circlescapes virtual tour is more affordable than you may think. We can fit almost any budget with a “starter” tour as low as $3500, a more comprehensive tour averaging around $9000 or a campus tour + a VR experience for under $20,000.

And since you host the tour with your other website files, there are no recurring fees.


 

How Long does it take?

We’ll deliver your virtual tour about 2-3 weeks after we finish with the photography.

What’s the next step?

Schedule a demo and contact us to get a quote – you just let us know how many panoramas you need, and what types of interactive elements you’d like in your virtual campus tour. We’ll send you a price quote, then pick a photography date.