In my role as Digital Marketing and Communications Manager at the University of Birmingham, I worked with agency Smile to commission an innovative virtual tour.

Producing a virtual tour for the University posed a challenge – the campus was a key selling point to prospective students, but was undergoing major redevelopment. We therefore needed a flexible, agile solution that could adapt as the physical campus changed.

Smile won a tender process with their proposal of a virtual tour using the Google Maps API, which meant that as their maps updated, our virtual tour would too. Additionally, the tour had social integration to display geolocated tweets and Instagram posts from the University’s active social media community.

The virtual tour also gave us a platform to live stream through YouTube Live and in 2013 we were the first University to live stream our Undergraduate Open Day.