360 Tour of the Georgia Dome

It’s hard to deny that most of us on the Education and New Media team are just a little bit nerdy. I’m pretty sure other GPB teams haven’t mapped the staff to members of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We might have figured out who is Riker, Data, Worf, Geordi, Troi, Crusher, Tasha Yar or Guinan. As long as I get to be Picard.

One thing that comes with the territory of being a little nerdy is when you see something cool, you immediately want to be able to do the same thing. Last year, when we saw some of the new cool things being done with 360 panoramic photographs, we knew we needed to be able add that to our web site.

Our idea is that we could use the 360 technology to create virtual field trips of Georgia historic sites for the upcoming Georgia History textbook. But we thought it could make for a neat feature for sports too. It so happened that shortly after we got the equipment needed to do this, the Corky Kell football tournament at the Georgia Dome was coming up. This was a perfect time to test the equipment out. Here’s what we saw:

We learned a great deal doing this: the challenges of getting a proper exposure on a fisheye wide angle lens; dealing with people who might move around as you take the series of photographs; that it’s possible to get as dizzy looking up into the stands as it is looking down. But the result was still impressive, and I’ll doubt I’ll be able to say that I stood on the 50 yard line of the Georgia Dome again.

You’ll find a 360 stadium tour for all of GPB’s Friday Night Football games on the individual football matchup pages. Stay tuned to learn more about GPB’s upcoming interactive digital textbook of Georgia history where you’ll see the impressive educational possibilities that the technology makes possible.