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Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, has been awarded the CampusTours August 2002 Four Star Virtual Campus Tour Award. Bucknell becomes the first institution to receive the coveted CampusTours Four Star Virtual Tour Award twice! Bucknell has developed a stunning new virtual tour designed specifically for users with broadband connections that provides a full fifteen minute overview of the university complete with audio narratives of each tour stop from current students and filled with colorful university photographs. Bucknell's new tour provides a glimpse of how virtual tours are beginning to change in an attempt to convey more useful university information to prospective students.
Bucknell's new virtual tour eschews the recent trend toward 'map-navigated' tours, and instead presents visitors with a compelling, linear presentation which visitors can watch in its entirety in approximately fifteen minutes. Alternately, visitors can use the navigation bar of campus photographs at the bottom of the screen to jump to any area of interest quickly, and a map overview of each tour location preceding the tour stop allows students to get some feel for the layout of campus.
The new Bucknell virtual tour uses Macromedia Flash technology to provide a more polished and compelling presentation. [You may download a FREE copy of the Macromedia Flash Player.] Despite the amount of audio encoded into the Bucknell tour, most stops load reasonably quickly over a high-bandwidth connection, and users with modems may either wait while the tour loads, or may choose to take the low-bandwidth tour. Maintaining two separate tours for users with differing Internet connection speeds allows Bucknell to provide a more immersive experience to those students with faster connections without disadvantaging those students who visit the tour using slower modems. This practice of offering two presentations for prospective students is gaining momentum with colleges, many of whom already have the standard photo tour and are beginning to develop more substantial multimedia and video presentations.
The new Bucknell University virtual tour clearly illustrates the strides that universities have made in tours since the first online expeditions appeared in 1994. The CampusTours Awards Committee found this to be an compelling presentation worthy of the CampusTours Four-Star Virtual Tour Award!
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