Aaron Yeo

ENHANCE  Veronica Krawcewicz (right) and Dan Amerongen (centre) helped build the models and textures under the purview of director Jennifer Chesney.

University builds 3D models for virtual campus experience

Students hired by university to photograph and design Google Earth buildings

As another year gets going, thousands of new students who have never seen the University of Alberta campus before now have a new tool to help them learn their way around — one of the most detailed campus map systems in North America, built by a group of four students.

The team of students, led by Jennifer Chesney, executive director of university web strategy, has created a set of three-dimensional models of buildings on all five U of A campuses that are being implemented into Google Earth. A set of interactive two-dimensional maps were also built for the recently redesigned U of A website.

“On our old site all we had was just a pretty rudimentary map,” Chesney said. “With a 3D map, you really get a good feeling for the relationship between buildings, (like) which are taller (and) how far apart they are.”

Chesney wanted to make an interactive map of campus a priority as part of the re-launched website, in both 2D and 3D. Industrial design students Veronica Krawcewicz, Max Amerongen, Larry Kwok and Mathew Hale were hired for the summer to make that happen.

“It was really important to have students intimately involved with the project,” Chesney said.

The students were responsible for taking photos of campus buildings to help them generate 3D models and textures that were then submitted to Google Earth. While other institutions like Stanford University and the University of Toronto have done the same, their maps aren’t nearly as detailed as the ones the U of A students were tasked with making.

Windows have reflections, walls have vines, and distinguishable features like the equations on the side of Natural Resource Engineering Facility and the Education building mural were all included in the textures. However, the team says the quality did suffer due to the compression Google uses. When dealing with Google bureaucracy, Krawcewicz said there were many issues in the approval process.

“Sometimes they tell us that a building (we submitted) doesn’t exist, because their satellite photos show a big hole, or shows a construction site or something, and then we have to send them photos to prove that there is a giant building where we say it is,” Krawcewicz said.

The recent BDes grad said that there were a few buildings that were already on Google Earth, that were probably made by other students as unofficial projects, but their detail was lacking. Google would then reject the newer models the team made since they already existed in their system.

“We would have to send them back an email with a point by point list of criteria of why our model is better than theirs,” Krawcewicz laughed.

Because the 3D map is only accessible by Google Earth, Chesney explained that they had to make video flythroughs for the website, to allow people without the program to get a feel for campus.

The website’s 2D map has also been upgraded from a PDF to an interactive system, that features information layers that can be turned on and off. They show details like restaurants, study spaces and even bike rack and door locations, things Chesney said she feels people already used to campus “take for granted.”

The map also features social media layers, allowing viewers to see activity such as recent tweets or foursquare check-ins that originate from campus, but location-based services in general aren’t as developed as they are in the United States.

“Students are always telling other students about cool things they find, like ‘Oh, here’s a good place to study,’ or ‘Oh, that was a good burrito,’ so I thought it was important to take advantage of those tools students are using,” Chesney said.

Also on the website are 360-degree panoramas made of 300 photos stitched together, to give a perspective not unlike that in Google’s Street View, but is currently limited to three locations on North Campus.

“I hope that people who feel that 3D models are cold and artificial can see that our models are human,” Chesney said. “We really made them feel alive, and not just a set of mathematical points. There’s a human connection. It’s really a blend of science and art.”

After building and uploading 130 buildings, 15 remain to get approved as the students return to class. Krawcewicz was rehired to continue and maintain the project. One of her goals is to add some interior building panoramas that weren’t ready for launch due to a software bug.

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