Students add to virtual tour

Image courtesy of Ola Ahlqvist A computer screenshot of Geography 680's virtual tour of Columbus shows Ohio Stadium. After 10 months of designing, Assistant Professor Ola Ahlqvist's undergraduate geography students recently finished their digital addition to retired Professor Henry Hunker's tour of Urban-Industrial Columbus. The virtual tour is the first of its kind to bring Hunker's original narratives alive before the eyes of its viewers.

In 1956, Hunker led a group of geographers from around the country on his tour of Columbus, to which he devoted decades of research. A team of students built upon his text to create a digital version, which displays 50 years of changes in Columbus, and is now available to the public. The virtual tour is complete with interactive maps, themes, videos and 3-D graphics that bring Columbus to life. The students wanted to create a three-dimensional experience that displayed a street view from the "people's eye" as opposed to the typical "bird's eye" viewpoint, said Michael Kurey, a junior in geographic information systems.

"It shows a lot of well-known places around Columbus and gives a historical perspective on those places," Ahlqvist said. "In addition, many places are explained by historic or contemporary photographs, video-clips and other Internet links."

The 18 students in Ahlqvist's class, Geography 680, a computer based mapping and visualization course, added what they found significant or interesting to Hunker's tour, Ahlqvist said.

"I added a few points of interest, such as buildings on campus and downtown landmarks," Kurey said. Kurey also added pictures to certain locations and worked on approximately 20 miles of places and paths included in the virtual tour.

"There is so much information available in this tour that it can seem overwhelming, so I tried to organize it in such a way that would be easy to follow," Kurey said.

Geography students, such as Kurey, worked over the summer to compile the new entries of the virtual tour.

While some of the undergraduate geography students helped design the tour for course credit, others voluntarily took on the project.

"I wanted to do something over the summer other than just a statistics class, and Professor Ola presented me with an opportunity to work with him on finalizing the Hunker Tour," Kurey said.

A plethora of software and other resources were necessary to complete the design of the tour. The students used geographic information software including Google SketchUp, Google Maps and Google Earth to view and edit their projects.

"They also had to learn some basic HTML and KML coding to adjust visual properties, and some content of the tour," Ahlqvist said.

Despite the difficulty and time commitment, students were proud of their projects.

"The hard work was well worth the result, and learning experience," said Chris Robbins, a senior in geography, who also spent more than a month working on the tour.

The tour is linked from the department of geography's Web site and can be viewed at www.geography.osu.edu/get-connected/hunker.

Abby Hooper can be reached at hooper.57@osu.edu.