Hello everyone!
I am currently trying to brainstorm other ideas for re-creating a VR Tour assignment. For the last couple years, some professors at the college I work at do VR Tour assignments that involve 360 images, creating some type of walking route, and then annotating the images. If you want to see an example of the assignment and instructions - this StoryMap has the full instructions with an example.
It doesn't have to be super fancy - just a walking effect and adding a marker that contains 1-3 sentences at the most - but it's a really nice assignment for beginner users. The most common use for it is the language courses who use it as a sightseeing tour presentation.
We use Street View Download 360 to obtain the photos from Google Maps (that's the easy part) and then uploaded them to Thinglink for annotation. Except in April, Thinglink finally changed their free account to be a trial account. It used to be that you could use it as long as you were okay with everything being public only, but they finally decided to end that for the free account, which has put us in a bit of a bind.
In a nutshell, this is what I'm trying to replicate:
- Download photos from Google Maps (we can still do this no problem)
- Convert it into a 360 photo/photo sphere
- Have some way to connect the photos to create a travel effect
- This doesn't HAVE to be exactly like annotated markers, but just any effect that could create a similar feel
- Is free and doesn't require coding --> these are freshman students that are typically not involved in computer science or have a GIS background, so this assignment is meant to be an introduction to spatial thinking. So coding web apps or creating python scripts is a no-go
My initial thought is as long as I can create the VR photos, I can embed them into StoryMaps (maybe into a sidecar) and as users scroll they can see text content and still have the interactive 360 photo.
Any advice is welcome, or if someone does a similar assignment I would love to hear about it!
