U. virtual campus tour attracts more than 6,000 visitors

Within 30 days of its launch, 6,494 people visited an interactive virtual tour of the University's campus, according to Dena Stivella, Client Relationship Manager of YouVisit, the media company that helped create the tour.

According to a University press release, the Office of Admission and the Office of Communications worked together with YouVisit to create the tour.

YouVisit was founded in 2009 and has created virtual reality tours for Harvard University and Yale University, which launched in October 2014 and October 2011 respectively.

The University's tour, which includes 23 sites like iconic buildings, academic centers and student and recreational facilities, was turned live by the University on Feb. 22 and put up on its website on Feb. 25, according to Stivella. The tour is currently available in English, Korean, Mandarin and Spanish.

The four languages picked for the tour were based largely upon Princeton’s applicant pool according to Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye. Besides translating a few documents and publications into Spanish, this is the first time that Princeton has had a recruitment vehicle that is in foreign languages, Rapelye said.

The tour includes the athletics complex, with an imposing interior shot of Jadwin Gymnasium and a 360-degree panorama of the Shea Rowing Center; the East Pyne Hall courtyard and its full interior view of the octagonal Chancellor Green Rotunda; the Engineering Quadrangle, which includes a 360-degree photo of the newly-opened Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment; and the Carl Icahn Laboratory and its two-story louvers that move with the sun.

University students, several of whom are Orange Key tour guides on campus, are the virtual tour guides, according to Rapelye. The students picked were fluent in the languages they spoke on the tour, she added.

The virtual tour experience varies slightly from typical Orange Key tours, according to Orange Key tour guide Solveig Gold ’17, who participated in making the virtual tour.

“I had to stand in front of a green screen and read off of a teleprompter. It’s sort of like a regular Orange Key tour but it’s less personal — there are no anecdotes. It’s very matter-of-fact and to the point,” Gold said.

Photos from the Office of Communications were used to supplement admissions material and the 360-degree photos that YouVisit took in October, according to the Assistant Vice President of Communications Daniel Day.

“That was one of the beauties of the tour, that we could aggregate all of these materials to give people a deeper look at campus,” Day said.

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The project has been in the works for 18 months, according to Rapelye. Although photos for the tour were initially planned for August, the project was pushed back to October, so the virtual tour was not launched until Feb. 25.

Rapelye said the switch to October was ultimately a good decision.

“The photographs exceeded our expectations in terms of how beautiful the campus could look. We were very pleased that our beautiful campus looked so stunning in the pictures,” she added.

Stivella said that the tour has had approximately double the amount of visitors she would typically expect from a school within the first 30 days of launching their tour. The average amount of time spent per visit is 10 minutes, which compares to an average of six to eight minutes for other sites. In those first 34 days, the tour had visitors from all 50 states and Washington D.C. as well as 111 countries, noted Rapelye.

Rapelye added the Office of Admission is still monitoring the virtual tour to decide whether to expand the tour into other languages.

“Of course, any student that is thinking about coming to Princeton needs to speak English very well. We offer the tool for family members that might not speak the language as well as the applicant,” she said.