Aalto University

Aalto University

European Design Awards 2021 – SILVER. In category: Digital Miscellaneous.

Kuldmuna 2021 awards – GOLD. In category: Digital services and apps.

Awwwards – Honorable mention

How would you make a virtual tour for a high-ranked international University with a strong visual identity?

There is no other choice but to strive to make the best virtual tour anyone has ever made for a university. It has to have top-of the art photography, excellent design that reflects the university’s visual identity, a super-smooth user interface, the most comfortable user experience in any platform, and then also that something special that has not been done before.

We believe that all of these things are present in the new virtual tour, which was created for Aalto University, making it one of the best virtual tours that has ever been created for an educational institute.

Standout features in Aalto University virtual tour include:

Custom made intro animation in SVG format
3D generated overview map at the beginning of the tour
44 spherical 360° panoramas
3 spherical 360° videos
Information hotspots throughout the tour with the possibility to include text, links, videos and photos
Mini map at the bottom left corner to show the current building/area
Special VR mode: allows to experience the tour using VR headset (for example Oculus Quest)
User interface, designed according to Aalto University CVI
Separate user interface designed to work with smaller mobile devices
Audio guide (actually different audio guides, one for main tour and separate guide for each Thematic tour)
Thematic Tours feature: allow us to present smaller guided tours inside one large University tour
Code and structure that is optimized for easier future updatability (adding languages, more panoramas, Thematic tours and so on
Detailed custom Google Analytics with event tracking.

Those key features are applied to the tour in an orchestrated way to create simple and fluent experience. Observant user will also notice that the elements in the user interface do not just simply appear but nearly all movements are animated, creating unprecedentedly smooth feel.

Despite Krpano being the main platform of this virtual tour, most of the user interface is made by pure Javascript. It is coded to be highly expandable in the future so one can add extra languages, more thematic tours and of course new locations in the tour – without much of a hassle in the code. So we can expect this tour to grow and be even better for the years to come.

See Aalto University campus tour