Prospective Ball State students will soon be able to tour the university from their home computers and Palm Pilots because of several Ball State undergraduates who have created a new digital campus tour.
Titled "Everything You Need on a CD," the tour is one of four projects resulting from a partnership between Ball State's Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry and the Center for Media Design.
Alfred Johnson, project manager for the Tell-a-Vision program funded by the Center for Media design, said he oversaw the year-long digital campus tour project . He said he was glad to be able to work with the undergraduates as they created such a worthwhile innovation.
"This has been a good project," Johnson said. "I think these students have raised the bar, and future students who see the work they've done will want to do as well or better."
Assistant professor of multimedia John Dailey said the six primary students who participated in the year-long project include senior Mike Walthour, team leader and lead artist; senior Stephanie Lynch, team business manager; senior Stephen Reding, tech specialist; senior Scott Sylte, member of the video team; senior Jennifer Henson, also a member of the video team; and recent graduate Joseph McKay, tech specialist.
The students, all of whom were telecommunications majors, took a media software class Dailey taught in fall 2002. Johnson said during the semester, the students developed the idea for a new digital campus tour and worked with Dailey to submit a proposal for the project to the Tell-a-Vision program in early December 2002.-รก
The team finally began its work on the project in January 2003.
Johnson said the students used Tribeworks iShell3 technologies to create digital illustrations of buildings on the Ball State campus. The tour covers all major areas between Bethel and McKinley avenues, he said.
The CD will have panoramic view options and special zoom functions that allow students to see detailed close-ups of university buildings. Video interviews with several Ball State professors will be included as well.
Johnson said the CD will even provide several historical facts about the facilities on campus and will include detailed information about the classes offered in each department, such as the typical class size in each major. He said such features will make the digital campus tour an effective tool for prospective Ball State students.
"The tour packs more punch and is more fun to use than most campus tours out there," he said. "It provides an unusually personal way to learn about Ball State, and that's great."
Walthour said he was fortunate to be able to participate in the new digital campus tour. As team leader and lead artist, his special role in the project was to create computer illustrations of Ball State's buildings using actual photographs of the campus as references.
Walthour said McKay took a series of more than 1000 digital photographs of Ball State's facilities. Walthour then spent three months drawing each building using Adobe Photoshop.
Buildings such as the Art and Journalism Building and Lucina Hall would take more than 20 hours each to draw, he said.
Despite the long hours he spent on the project, Walthour said he enjoyed playing his part and is looking forward to providing prospective Ball State students with the new software.
"(The software) really puts the campus in a perspective more native to (high school) students," he said. "I think the tour will benefit them, and I really feel proud that I was able to be involved with something so big."
Lynch said she also enjoyed collaborating with the other team members to create the new CD and was glad she too had a special role in the project.
Lynch used Tribeworks' new iShell Mobile program to transfer information from the new CD into a memory card format that people will be able to access on personal data assistants such as Palm Pilots.
She said working on the digital campus tour project gave her hands-on experience in multimedia that will help her in the future.
"This project has made me realize that this is actually what I want to do as a career," she said.
Johnson said in addition to developing an exceptional self-guided campus tour, the six students achieved another honorable objective as they worked with software developers in California to clean up glitches in the Tribeworks iShell 3 technology. Students even helped the developers to revise the software's user manual, he said.
Dailey, who served as the students' official faculty advisor, said he enjoyed helping his students create and improve their new software throughout the past year.
The students' passion was commendable, he said.
"They knew what their roles were, and they performed them well," Dailey said.
Walthour said he appreciated how Dailey, the telecommunications department and the Virginia B. Ball Center all worked together to help the students with their project.
The Tribeworks iShell 3 staff were also helpful as they assisted the students in overcoming technical problems throughout the designing process, he said.
"Without (them all), none of these iComm projects would have been possible," Walthour said.
Johnson said the six students' hard work in using and fine-tuning the iShell 3 software landed them the opportunity to be the first group of students to speak at Tribeworks' software conference, held in San Francisco on Jan. 7-11.
Walthour said the students received positive feedback as they presented their digital tour to the crowd.
"One of us even got offered a job," he said.
Walthour said he was proud to be able to showcase the hard work he and his fellow students accomplished throughout the past year. Their success will help to encourage other students who are interested in multimedia, he said.
"Prospective students will come in and see this (project) was not done by a big corporation and a $50,000 budget, but by everyday students who had an idea and found a way to make it possible," he said.
Like other students on the team, Walthour said he is looking forward to completing other multimedia projects in the future, as well as enhancing the new digital campus tour.
Dailey said within one year, a second version of the tour could be created that will provide a virtual reality campus tour for prospective students.
The new version is expected to have updated features, particularly illustrations of new facilities such as the future Music Instruciton Building. The new version will also provide more historical information on the university itself.
The telecommunications students and faculty are planning a release party on Feb. 7 for the new digital campus tour CD, which will be distributed for free to local high school guidance offices. Lynch said the CDs might eventually be distributed to other high schools throughout Indiana and the United States.
The mobile Palm Pilot edition of the tour is also expected to be released Feb. 7.
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