With much of the world still shut down due to COVID-19, traveling to tour college campuses has become infeasible for many prospective students. Seeking instead for a way to bring Rice to the student, the office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies reached out to the Digital Media Commons to create a virtual tour of campus that offered more immersion than a standard video. The resulting project produced a 360 degree video made up of panoramas of places of interest around campus, which when paired with Google Cardboard headsets allow a prospective student to pan around the scene and take in the sights.
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Ian produced the video by shooting a series of photos of each location, taking multiple passes rotating around a stationary point to create a sphere. Then, those individual photos were organized, aligned, and stitched using Agisoft Metashape, resulting in a 360 degree panoramic output. Finally, the completed panoramas were compiled into a single 360 video using Adobe Premiere Pro, adding in the narration and background music.