Virtual Galapagos
The Virtual Galapagos project is a concerted effort by a small team consisting of myself, a professor at Colgate, a member of Colgate’s instructional design team, and four other undergraduate students. Our primary objective is to create a learning experience for children around the world to learn complex science through the lens of the Galapagos. Our core philosophy is that the science should be digestible, without being presented as overly simplistic, and that students should be able to choose their own path, taking agency in their learning. We are currently developing a pilot of this program in the form web-based experience to maximize accessibility for the project worldwide, which is live here.
This project began in the summer of 2017, when I spent 10 weeks on the Colgate campus working on this project. This included a 10-day trip to the Galapagos, where I collected 168 different shots of 360° video utilizing two Go-Pro camera rigs. Through this experience, I gained great familiarity with working with 360° video and the nuances of stitching six different shots together into a single 360° shot using Kolor Autopano Video Pro. This project continued into the following summer, where I worked as the sole developer of this project, implementing the vision created by our design team. Currently, I am building this project using Bootstrap and HTML5, and the source code is available here.
This project continues to allow me to acquire new skills while further developing existing ones. I have become far more proficient in web development, implementing my own interactive experiences. Despite having no prior experience with 360° video, I am now very familiar with the process of shooting, and later processing, 360° video. Below is an example of a shot I filmed, and later stitched, while in the Galapagos. More importantly, this project has given me extensive experience with all aspects of web development, from codebase architecture design to Linux server management to quality assurance, as I have implemented the entire project from the ground up.