How To Create A Virtual Campus Tour To Attract Students Effectively [2024]

Choosing a college is a very important decision for any student. Every student wants to go to a college that has a good education, great facilities, and a brilliant college campus.

If you own a college or are responsible for promoting your college campus, then you must ensure you have a virtual campus tour on your website.

The fact is, most students or their parents usually research online to find out the most suitable colleges.
If you have an attractive online campus tour on your website, it can be one of the factors to ensure your college is the right option.

Today we will look at how you can create a virtual campus tour and optimize it to attract more students to consider your college.

Once you read this article, you will learn

• why you must have a VR college tour on your website,
• how you can create a virtual campus tour easily, and
• how to optimize virtual college tours to make them more engaging.

And eventually, you will be able to attract more local and international students to inquire about your college.

Fangen wir an.

Why Do You Need To Have A Virtual Campus Tour?

A virtual campus tour will let your prospective students get a glimpse of how the campus is in reality.

Through this virtual campus visit, you will have a chance to show off all the best areas of your college, including hallways, college rooms, faculty areas, dormitories, classrooms, labs, etc.

If well-presented, it will help attract students and their parents.

And if you can make it more engaging with additional information in the tour, it may help connect with them even more.

Let us look at some key reasons you must have a virtual campus tour.

1. Have An Engaging Strategy To Attract New Students

A virtual tour is probably the most engaging piece of content that you could have to connect with potential students.

While having the right subjects and faculties are essential, the campus is just as important.

If you have an attractive virtual college tour in place, most students would want to spend more time finding out about your college.

You could also add contact forms within the tour so that students can easily inquire for more information while taking the tour – a perfect way to connect with them on the go.

In the process, you could get more inquiries and have a chance to register more new students.

2. Attract Both Local And International Students

Local students can take a college tour directly. But if you do admit international students, they aren’t lucky enough to get a tour before taking admission.

Hence, they need to either observe images & video tours, or you could entice them more effectively with a VR campus tour.

A near-realistic tour will help remove any doubts about your college campus and may influence international students to put you on their priority lists.

The same can be said about distant local students, who can travel to the college, but the virtual tour would make it much easier to attract them while they are researching your college.

3. Impress The Students With Your High-Standards

Your virtual tour should show off how well-built your campus is and that it is of the highest standards.

For students, they want a campus they can be proud of.

Images and videos can hardly do that. But, a quality virtual campus tour can be the best way to present the high standards to the students.

4. Captivate The Parents With Quality and Well-being

Parents are more interested in finding out if the college campus is safe and well-groomed for the upbringing of their children in the next few years.

You have to demonstrate the safety measures, culture, quality, and innovation within the tour.

To do so, you may add additional information on every important aspect of the tour, such as the lab facilities, sports & fitness areas, club facilities, surveillance for security, etc.

5. Highlight The Key Features Of Your College

As mentioned before, the college virtual tour allows you to showcase the best areas & facilities of your college.

For example, some students want dedicated sports fields, while some parents may want to observe if a good library is available. In the case of international students, vr tours of the dorms would be a huge plus.

Requirements To Create A Virtual College Tour

When creating a VR college tour, you need to do the following:

1. Capture 360 Panoramas Of Every Area Of Your College
   You may use digital 360 cameras to take high-quality 360 panoramic images of your college.
   ~ Here are a few 360 cameras you could consider using.

2. Take Aerial 360 Photos For Larger Attractions Of Your College
   To highlight larger areas, such as the football field or the birds-eye view of the whole campus, you could take 360 photos using a drone.
   ~ Here is a guide on how you can capture 360 photos using drone.

3. Use A Virtual Tour Creator To Craft An Engaging Virtual Campus Tour
   Choose a reliable virtual tour creator to build a virtual tour and make it engaging with more details.
   • We recommend you use a WordPress website and use WPVR, which is a brilliant VR tour creator.
   • Once you have a basic tour in place, you may then use WPVR Pro to add more engaging elements such as a college map, introductory video etc.
     

4. Place Your Virtual Tour On The Website
   Create a separate page to host the virtual tour. You may also add it to the home page of your college.

5. Encourage More Students To Take A Tour
   Add pop-ups and CTAs on your home page and other website pages to take a tour. You may also do the same via social posts.

Now, let us look at how you can craft a virtual campus tour using the tool we recommended, WPVR.

How To Create Virtual Campus Tours For Your College Using WPVR

First, install and activate WPVR in your WordPress Dashboard. Here’s how

Go to WPVR Get Started Page & configure the basic Settings

Here are the options that you may enable so that your Virtual Tour is flawless.

1. Create Your First Virtual Campus Tour Scene

At first, Add a New Tour,

Now, Add the title of the tour,

Then,

• Click on Upload to add a Scene
• Provide a Scene ID
• Click Preview to check how the virtual campus tour will look

If you like how the tour looks, then click on Publish.

2. Add Engaging Hotspots To Add Interactive Content

Hotspots are different pointers that give information about something from a virtual tour. It can be texts, images, videos, and other media files.

Here’s how you can add a hotspot to a Virtual Tour,

• Go to Hotspot Tab under the Scenes Tab
• Provide a Hotspot ID & a Hotspot Type.

– Here’s a guide on how to add Hotspots.

• Click on the spot you want to add a hotspot on. You will notice the values of Pitch & Yaw appear below the tour preview. Then click on the arrow icon to assign these coordinates to place the hotspot there.

• You may add some On-Hover Content and On-Click Content in the hotspots
• There’s a Hotspot Custom Icon and a Custom Color Option to show the hotspot in a more interactive manner.

Once you’ve added the hotspot, Preview the tour to see if the hotspot is in the right place. If it is, then update the tour.

*Note that the Hotspot Custom Icon & Hotspot Custom Icon Color will not be visible in the backend. You’ll need to place the tour on a page and preview it to get a glimpse of how it looks.

3. Use Advanced Features For Connecting With Students

There are many advanced features in the WPVR Pro Version that will let you add more interactional elements in a Virtual Tour in order to connect with your students more.

i. Contact Form For Student Query

Your students might have different questions about college facilities or maybe the application process. So why not add a contact form within the Virtual Tour?

With WPVR Fluent Forms Addon, you can now add Contact Forms in the hotspots. In fact you may add multiple forms inside a virtual tour.

Here’s how it looks in a virtual tour,

ii. Add Explainer Video

The Explainer Video feature will let you add an introductory video inside of the Virtual Tour. Your prospective students can play the video and take the tour at the same time.

Use this feature to showcase College’s history, present opportunities, and all the other exceptional trademarks.

iii. Scene Gallery To Show All Campus Grounds

You may add multiple Scenes in a Virtual Tour and show them in a gallery.

Take 360 panorama images of all the spaces of your college covering the sports grounds, study halls, dormitory, and canteens, then add them as scenes in your Virtual Campus Tour.

Your prospective students can move from one scene to another using the Scene Gallery option.

Und das war's.

4. Embed Your VR College Tour On Your Website

The next thing to do is to embed your tour on your website.

You may use the virtual tour shortcode or use blocks/widgets to place it.

• Here’s a guide to embed your virtual tour on a webpage.

Schlussbemerkungen

As you saw, it’s super easy to create and embed a virtual campus tour on your website.

Having an online college tour that is engaging and revealing about your college standards and best campus facilities could be a game changer to grow your educational institution significantly.

So go ahead and get WPVR now. Create your own campus tour now and start admiting more students.

Zum Wohl.