UVU Immersive Virtual Tours

VR Experience Design | UVU Digital Media Department |
Award: UVU Digital Media Medal of Recognition

The Problem

When the COVID-19 pandemic eliminated in-person field trips, Utah Valley University's Digital Media Department faced a real instructional gap: how do you give K–12 students meaningful, place-based educational experiences when they can't leave their homes?

The project originally centered on deploying Oculus VR headsets directly into K–12 classrooms. Two problems quickly surfaced: legislative changes restricted VR headset use in K–12 school environments, and the headset vendor went unresponsive for weeks, leaving the team at an impasse with equipment already purchased and no clear path forward.

Rather than abandoning the headset work, I proposed adding a parallel solution: a desktop virtual tour library that could reach students and the wider community without hardware requirements. The two delivery formats — headsets and desktop — would run alongside each other, extending the project's reach while the headset challenges were worked through.

The Audience

Original Audience:

The original audience was towards K–12 students and classroom teachers seeking immersive virtual field trip experiences.

Updated Audience:

With the addition of the desktop tour library, the project opened to the broader community — educators, families, and the general public seeking accessible, place-based learning experiences without specialized hardware.

Both audiences required experiences that were visually compelling, educationally meaningful, and easy to navigate.

The Process

Adding a Parallel Desktop Solution:

Recognizing that the headset obstacles would take time to resolve, I proposed developing a desktop virtual tour library in parallel — capturing immersive imagery and publishing it to a publicly accessible website. This expanded the project's impact without abandoning the original headset work.

The goals for the desktop library included:

1. Building an inclusive virtual field trip library accessible to students, educators, and the broader community.

2. Elevating tour quality through meticulous User Experience (UX) design and consistent capturing techniques.

3. Expanding the content library through institutional partnerships (National Park Service, Thanksgiving Point).

Capture and Production:

As VR Tour Creator and Experience Designer, I led planning and execution of capture sessions at locations including Provo Pioneer Village and the Orem Heritage Museum. Each location required stakeholder outreach, consent coordination, and logistical planning before a single image was taken.

Bryce Canyon National Park:

A separate but related project evolved: serving as VR Experience Designer for a National Park Service initiative at Bryce Canyon's Visitor Center — capturing immersive footage to support remote accessibility to the park.  Since learners were unable to leave their home.  The goal of working with institutions like the National Parks Service were to continue making and visitor experience relevant to all, including those with accessibility limitations who would now be able to engage in Bryce Canyon's Visitor Center.

Design Decisions 

Desktop Library as Parallel Delivery, Not Replacement: 

The key framing shift in this project was treating the desktop tour site as an expansion of reach rather than a fallback. Running it alongside the headset work meant neither format was abandoned — and the desktop library ultimately reached a much wider audience.

Hotspot Popups as Accessibility Solution: 

Several nodes at Bryce Canyon's Visitor Center had overexposed areas where signage became unreadable. Rather than reshooting the footage, I added interactive Photoshop hotspot popups with image and video detail overlays — turning a technical limitation into an enhanced learner interaction.

Underexposure as Capture Principle: 

A key technical takeaway from this project: underexposing images during capture preserves highlight detail that can be recovered in post-processing. Overexposed images lose data permanently. This insight now shapes how I approach any media-heavy instructional project.

Outcome

• 15+ virtual tours produced across Utah destinations including Bryce Canyon National Park and Provo Pioneer Village.

• 9 tours published to the UVU Digital Media Virtual Tour Site; the live site is currently offline due to UVU web server changes.  An archived version remains accessible via the Internet Archive (link below).

• Project presented at UVU's SCULPT Conference and the Digital Media Department DGM Showcase.

• Digital Media Department awarded the team medallions recognizing outstanding contributions to the project.

*The archived website can be found at : https://web.archive.org/web/20240714110916/https://virtualtours.dgmuvu.com/ 

Reflection

While celebrating the project's resounding success, it is important to acknowledge the challenges encountered along the way. Scope creep became a formidable obstacle due to enticing collaboration opportunities with esteemed organizations like the National Park Service and Thanksgiving Point. Balancing these opportunities with our core project objectives proved pivotal, as it influenced the prioritization of user testing. Consequently, we identified limitations in scalability, particularly on mobile devices, prompting valuable insights for future enhancements.

Effective knowledge transfer became paramount when passing on extensive footage to subsequent teams, leading us to implement robust documentation practices and streamlined communication channels to ensure seamless handovers to the next leg of the project.

Overall, our unwavering commitment, innovative problem-solving, and fruitful partnerships have successfully addressed accessibility challenges, revolutionizing virtual field trips for the benefit of UVU's Digital Media Department, Utah Valley University, and the wider community.