Visit the Faculty of Health virtually
The NWU’s Faculty of Health is hosting virtual tours of their schools, for prospective students to explore the courses on offer.
Karen Tredoux, communication practitioner of the NWU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, said: “The virtual tours are a faculty initiative that started in February 2020, but this was put on hold because of the Covid-19 pandemic”. Towards the end of 2020, the Faculty of Health Sciences was able to start working on this initiative again, to create the tours.
Tredoux said that the virtual tours were created to allow prospective students and visiting students an opportunity to tour and experience their faculty and develop a better understanding of the courses that the NWU Faculty of Health Sciences offer.
According to the virtual tour web page, one can take virtual tours of all five schools in the faculty. They are the School of Physiology, Nutrition, Consumer Sciences and Occupational Hygiene, the School of Human Movement Sciences, the School of Nursing, the School of Pharmacy and the School of Psychosocial Health.
During the virtual tours, the visitor can see lecture halls, with introductory videos to the course. They can also visit laboratories with explanations of different lab work and lab equipment. At the lab equipment section, there are step-by-step explanations on how to use the equipment and what the equipment does.
Tredoux said that creating the tours was a strong team effort, and each course team had to research what prospective students want to know and tell the service provider how to best showcase their courses. 360 cameras were used to capture 360 images as well as video footage. Some of the video footage was taken in 2D while the rest was taken in 3D.
All the photos and video content was stitched together with 360 Virtual Tours, a virtual tour creation software, after which multimedia elements such as embedded videos and photos were added.
Tredoux said: “The entire series, from concept to delivery, took approximately nine months”. This included the research process, the planning of the shots, and the information to include in the tours as well as the actual shooting of the photos and video footage.
