360° Virtual Tours: Visit our seven campuses

How can students visit our campuses during the pandemic? A look at how we filmed and produced immersive online visits of our seven campuses.

The Covid 19 pandemic obliged Sciences Po to rethink key events in the academic calendar, in particular, the Open House Day that usually takes place in person. There were two major goals: to organize an effective remote presentation of our academic program, and to allow potential students to get to know our seven campuses.

For the presentation of our academic program, we decided to create a series of short videos. A conference room was transformed into a video studio for the recording sessions. In parallel, several dozen web conference and webinar sessions were held on Zoom.

For the campus visits, we decided to supplement our drone equipment (acquired in 2019 to enrich our videos with high-quality images) with 360° video cameras to offer virtual tours of each of our campuses that also included aerial views. We opted for two types 360° video cameras: the Insta360 Pro, featuring six lenses for extra high-quality shooting, and its little sister, the Insta ONE R, that allows us to give our Phantom 4 V2 drone the ability to take 360° aerial views.

If handling the video cameras is relatively simple, production is more complex, requiring route planning, choosing camera placement, and deciding on the sequence of the various segments of the visit. Once the 360 view sequences have been filmed, they need to be retouched and go through what is called in 360 jargon “video stitching.” This consists of recomposing all the segments with their various camera angles into a 360 view. In the final step, the images are integrated into 3DVISTA software.

The virtual tours allowed many students and their parents to observe, as if they were on site, the architectural riches, the building layouts, and the points of interest of each of our campuses. We are currently working on a virtual visit of the new campus at 1 Saint-Thomas, inaugurated on January 24, 2022.

Take a 360° tour of our campuses.