Campus News
July 12, 2011
Virtual tour provides highlights of campus
Click the image above to navigate to the Virtual tour.
Emory's beautiful campus is showcased in a virtual tour with 360-degree images, a team effort between University Marketing and Goizueta Business School to capture the grounds and buildings for prospective students.
All nine schools are included in this tour, says Jan Gleason, executive director of University Marketing.
"It was hard to show all of Emory in 10 images," Gleason says, so the focus was on places relevant to students, like the Robert W. Woodruff Library and Woodruff Physical Education Center. The photographs were taken in April, shortly before this year's Commencement.
The business school "wanted a tour of Goizueta to showcase their great facilities for prospective students, and we were interested in having a strong virtual tour for Emory on www.emory.edu for the same reason," Gleason explains.
The Marketing-Goizueta collaboration resulted in cost savings, such as the travel expenses of the vendor, she notes.
Gleason says the University had the tour converted into the new HTML5 version for Apple devices, "which looks great on iPads."
She provided some statistics:
• Three percent of all visits to www.emory.edu are now via mobile devices.
• Visits to www.emory.edu on mobile devices are up 400 percent year over year.
• Nearly three out of four mobile device visits to www.emory.edu this year have been on Apple devices with a third of those being on iPads.
Gleason says Marketing sees this initial virtual tour "as perhaps the first module in a series of tours."
Other possibilities include residence life and graduate schools, depending on interest and budget resources. A virtual tour of Atlanta might be another, as Gleason notes that the city is a big selling point with prospective students.
"[The vendor] gave Emory an 11 on a scale of 1-10 for campus beauty," Gleason says. "The pride and attention to detail that Campus Services takes in caring for the campus really shows."
