Virtual Church Tour

May 15, 2022

Context

During my senior year at Stony Brook University I opted to take a course called Benevolent Computing or ISE 339. It was a project class focused on developing code to help non-profit and charity organizations. We were put into groups based on our skillsets, and paired with non-profits by our professor. My group was paired with the Oakdale Historical Society, and we were tasked with creating a prototype virtual tour of the St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakdale, NY. My professor then met with each group to give a sort of starting point, in my group’s case he pointed us towards Marzipano. The tool takes in 360 degree panoramas and stitches them together to create a 3D virtual environment.

Prototyping

My group eventually met with Maryann Almes of the Oakdale Historical Society over zoom. Maryann explained how she was looking for a mixture of media (text, images, and audio) to be included. After discussing our options, a web application definitely seemed like the best course of action. In the following weeks after our call, Maryann would regularly email us with images, articles, and historical documents to help with developing the tour. At this point I combined my own research with the additional documents emailed to us. I ended up making a directory on my computer, organizing info/media by families present in the church graveyard (a model eventually used in the tour itself).

Unfortunately it became clear that my groupmates were swamped with work from other classes, as a result I ended up developing the remainder of our project myself with some research help. I began by using stock panoramic images to get a better understanding of Marzipano. I managed to get a better picture of the source code spit out by the program, but I still required the actual images of St. John’s Church to make meaningful progress. After some time I got a ride from my Professor to the church, where we took the panoramas and some drone footage. The following day after the shoot I got straight to work (with the help of some Red Bull) organizing the images to make the 3D environment.

I had all my information/media organized in folders, and my base completed mostly by Marzipano, all that was left was displaying my research directly in the web application. I initially used Marzipano’s information bubbles feature, but it was extremely primitive (see demo), so I completely overhauled it. Rather than a simple bubble with some text, I made it into a panel with an image gallery, some fun facts, and audio clips. This took the majority of the time as I not only had to remove unnecessary code from the source, but also develop completely new JavaScript and restructure some JavaScript files. On top of this, optimizing the media and code to run somewhat quick was a bit of a time sink. With my remaining time I tried my best to make the tour look presentable through CSS.

Reflection

Looking at the project now there are definitely a few things I wish I had done. First is taking more time with the panoramic images. The current panoramas do the job fine, but the lighting in some areas is not ideal. Next is using a JavaScript framework to improve performance. The load time of the application is a bit of a sore spot for me as I know if I had more time I probably would have fixed it. Lastly I wish I did a better job with making the app responsive. Currently it scales okay with common computer displays, but past that it is not really usable. Ultimately it’s a prototype, and it works well enough for the Oakdale Historical Society’s purposes. More importantly, Maryann was really grateful for the web app, and seeing that made me feel really happy. I suppose creating that sense of accomplishment/fulfillment was the main purpose of the class.

Return