New Initiatives Grant Final Report
“Baldwinsville Library VR Tour Kit”
Please provide a brief narrative explaining your project and its outcomes.
We used our grant to acquire equipment to create a BPL Virtual Reality Tour kit. The kit is available for organizations and businesses to check out, so they can make a VR Tour and post it online. Our kit is a backpack containing a 360 camera, tripod, and a laptop with software to process the 360 photos. The Manual that is in the kit guides anyone with some tech experience through the process of shooting 360 pictures, processing them, and uploading them to 2 VR Tour sites (user choice): Google Street View (free but is complex & requires a phone app to use) or CloudPano (low-cost option we found after much exploration). Major obstacle was that Google Tour Maker, which was free and the best option out there, closed down in May 2021, so we had to find another option. If we could have used Google Tour Maker, we would have been ready to circulate the kit in March 2021, but finding another option and learning to use it took another 3 months. The kit was borrowed by another library in August 2021, and their suggestions led to updating the Manual. Currently the kit is on loan to the Durgee Junior High School’s Technology Teacher. We have suggested she and her students work with Baldwinsville’s Shacksboro Museum to create a VR tour for them.
What is the most remarkable accomplishment or finding of your project?
VR Tours are time consuming to make, but people really like them! We are quite proud of our online VR Tour: https://tinyurl.com/bvillelibrarytour
Please provide a brief summary of your evaluation activities and/or results, if available.
In spite of a steep learning curve, 360 photographic technology is at a point where anyone with tech experience can participate in VR creation. The primary free tool for creating VR Tours was discontinued by Google, and we still don’t know why. Because of that glitch in finding appropriate VR Tour Creator platform leading to delayed introduction, we have only been able to circulate the kit to one Library and to the local schools. Lending to a library for experimentation was a good step in troubleshooting our kit. Once we updated the manual to correct the omission of one important step, the borrowing library said it was fantastic.
Anything else you’d like us to know?
Librarian also participating in this project: Dania Souid, Young Adult Librarian, Baldwinsville Public Library. If anyone else does this, we would be glad to share our BPL VR Kit Manual. There are many VR Tour creation tools on the web. We looked at many of them, and chose based on several factors: Cost, Ease of Tour Editing, Ease of sharing, Sustainability (future costs and technology creep), easy access for new users. Google Tour Maker would have checked every box, but CloudPano is adequate because of their free setup and one-time fee. As long as their company exists we should have no problems.
Julia Schult
Experiential Learning Librarian, Baldwinsville Public Library
Are you interested in being our next New Initiatives Grant recipient? Check out the grant page for the rules & requirements!