In August 2021, Google discontinued their Google Tour Creator application, which allowed users to create interactive 360 tours that incorporated sound, text, 2D images, videos, and more. The closing of this application left many looking for alternatives for 360 tours that allowed for an equally immersive experience.

DePauw Professor Lydia Marshall reached out to the Tenzer Technology Center to assist in recreating a tour of the Koobi Fora region located near Lake Turkana in Kenya. This tour, originally created by the American Museum of Natural History, follows their research team as they continue archaeological research to look for new evidence of major stages in human evolution.

Recreating the Scenes

In order to recreate the scenes, we first created an image log that indicated the vertical and horizontal coordinates of each image in a given photosphere. After creating this log, we utilized the source code to recover the captions and text highlights that needed to be included in each scene. The image log and source code allowed us to recreate the full tour in Lapentor, our chosen alternative to Google Tour.