Creating a virtual reality city tour.

I’ve been interested in virtual reality for quite a while and learning it bit by bit but this year decided to full embrace it and use it in the classroom. One of the first projects created with it was 360 Cork. A project which uses 360 images of Cork with added pinpoints using ThingLink 360.

How it was created.
Step 1.
The first thing to do was to get the 360 images. I was lucky to have a Theta 360 to use and so took off on an adventure around the city using the camera to capture images from key locations in Cork including Cork City Gaol, The English Market and Patrick’s Street. The biggest challenge on this particular day was to beat the weather as it had rained for the previous 10 days and I knew it was going to rain that day too but luckily it held off for most of the trip. This entire process of capturing the city took about 4 hours.

Step 2.
Once I had my main 360 photos the next step was to upload them to ThingLink 360. From here I was able to build a menu to connect my locations and insert multimedia features like video, images of historical Cork and interesting facts. This process was pretty intuitive for a beginner and only took a couple of hours to complete.

How it was shared.
In September Cork Culture night was taking place and so I figured it would be the perfect time to showcase this project.  On the night of the event, we hosted it at Apple RTC Cork based in St. John’s Central College.

Feedback from the project.
The project received some amazing feedback on the night from kids who tried to find me in every location (one challenge when capturing 360 photos is to hide yourself in the shot). Other feedback was received from some of the older attendees who got all nostalgic and said it was lovely to see the comparison of the city they remembered with modern cork. I also received a lot of requests to capture other areas of the city. I will work on these in the future.

Link to the final project                                                                                                                         (Compatible with VR headsets as well as desktop and mobile devices)                                                         You can visit the final project here.