Abstract
Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, college tours are no longer available, so many students have lost the opportunity to see their dream school’s campus. To solve this problem, we developed a product called “Virtourgo,” a university virtual tour website that uses Google Street View images gathered from a web scraper allowing students to see what college campuses are like even when tours are unavailable during the pandemic. The project consists of 3/4 parts: the web scraper script, the GitHub server, the Google Domains DNS Server, and the HTML files. Some challenges we met include scraping repeated pictures and letting the HTML dropdown menu jump to the correct location. We solved these by implementing Python and Javascript functions that specifically target such challenges. Finally, after experimenting with all the functions of the web scraper and website, we confirmed that it works as expected and can scrape and deliver tours of any university campus or public buildings we want.
Highlights
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in-person campus tours are no longer possible. This means that a lot of seniors in high school will miss the opportunity to see their dream schools’ campuses, which is significant in helping them form an idea of what college is like
We predict that even after the pandemic, when colleges and universities reopen their campuses to the public, there will still be a need for virtual tours, as not every applying senior will be able to take a tour at every school that they are interested in
C., et al created a virtual tour for Management and Science University (MSU) with augmented reality and virtual reality in 2019 and recorded that the majority of the users were happy with the product [16]
Summary
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in-person campus tours are no longer possible This means that a lot of seniors in high school will miss the opportunity to see their dream schools’ campuses, which is significant in helping them form an idea of what college is like. We predict that even after the pandemic, when colleges and universities reopen their campuses to the public, there will still be a need for virtual tours, as not every applying senior will be able to take a tour at every school that they are interested in. Google has many users; some of them own 360 cameras and have taken and uploaded the pictures of a school campus before This effectively solves the problem of needing people to go to the school and take pictures, as we can take advantage of those that are already available on the internet through a web scraper.
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