by Erin Gaffney

Internet users may soon be able to hang up their shoes and tour Carleton's campus with a click of a mouse.

Brent Welty

Brent Welty, a master of architecture student, has developed a prototype of a virtual campus map, www.chat.carleton.ca/~bwelty/. The program starts with the user's location on campus, computes directions from one building to another and extracts and displays photographs one at a time to show how to reach one's destination. The program factors in the user's preferred route whether it be outside or underground in the tunnels, the time of travel for safety reasons, the user's mode of transportation and whether one wants the quickest or the barrier-free route.

The virtual campus tour has been in the works for some time. The project began four years ago with federal government funding through the university's Paul Menton Centre for Persons with Disabilities. The goal was to create a virtual tour that would allow people with disabilities to check out the campus digitally and learn about its accessible routes prior to visiting it.

Photographs and maps of the interiors of the buildings on campus were developed. But before the project was completed, funding ran out. The Paul Menton Centre contacted the School of Architecture and asked if anyone there was interested in continuing the project. Last fall, Welty took over the virtual tour project to test his thesis on wayfinding in our built and virtual environments. His thesis, which was completed in the spring, includes a prototype of the virtual tour. Welty says there's enough information for someone to pick up where his work ends and continue with the computer programming. Further funding will be required to get the site up and running on Carleton's homepage.

The original intent of the virtual tour was to serve people with disabilities. But after delving into the project, Welty discovered the audience is much broader. "As we (Carleton) are moving more into the spotlight in terms of the Ontario universities, I think we really need to give ourselves that presence out there on the Net and here's the perfect opportunity to do that," says Welty.

Carleton University currently offers a pictorial tour of the campus and its facilities on its homepage. Alumni and prospective students are invited to visit the Web site at www.admissions.carleton.ca/Tours/vtour/ where they'll find video coverage of 17 key campus sites.