'Harvard Virtual Tour' Takes Prize

November 11, 1999

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By Alvin Powell
Gazette Staff

A "Virtual Tour" that takes visitors on an interactive walk around the Harvard campus has won the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council’s 1999 award for the best Educational Institution Sales and Marketing Web Site.

"It really promotes interactivity. It lets the user go and see what they want to," said Council Director Leslie Smith. "The time [Harvard] put into it and how [the University] embraced the technology really shows through."

Harvard’s site was one of five finalists for the award. Other finalists included recruitment CD-ROMs for Clark and Northeastern universities and Websites for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and for the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

Smith said the other finalists were strong candidates but lacked the Harvard Virtual Tour’s interactivity. The tour was created by the Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs.

The Virtual Tour, accessed through the News Office’s Website at http://www.news.harvard.edu, or directly at http://www.hno.harvard.edu/tour, lets visitors create their own walk through Harvard Yard and into the surrounding buildings. A visitor can wander into the Widener Library, for example, up the grand marble staircase, into the Widener Memorial Room, which houses a small collection of rare books, and then continue up the stairs into the Loker Reading Room or into the stacks.

The site has lower-resolution versions of the tour for those using older and slower computers.

"The most difficult part was trying to keep the tour on the cutting edge in a technological sense without losing visitors that might have a relatively low-tech setup for browsing the Web," said News Office Web Designer Cassie Ferguson, who helped create the tour. "The idea was to make it equally accessible and fun for someone browsing with a slow modem in Zaire as it would be for someone in Boston with a cable modem."

News Office Director Joe Wrinn said the award reflects the creativity and hard work of the Virtual Tour’s creators, Ferguson, writer Marvin Hightower, and consultants Michael Quan and Alix Quan. The Quans created the tour’s 75 computerized panoramas, each of which took about 36 individual images.

"The Web has become Harvard's busiest ‘front door,’ " said Wrinn. "Millions more people come to Harvard via the Internet than in person, and more people learn about the University through the Harvard homepage than through any other publication. It's important that this ‘first impression’ of Harvard reflect the quality and accessibility of the institution."

The tour was created by weaving together photographs, narratives, and graphics and then digitally blending the three.

"The goal of the Virtual Tour was to offer a glimpse of Harvard to visitors both near and far," said Michael Quan. "Using some cool Internet tools, we have offered a bit of Harvard to the world."