Interactive campus experience

Sparsholt College is a land-based college in Hampshire, teaching everything from animal management to agriculture across a campus that no prospectus can do justice to. Its facilities are its strongest selling point, and the college wanted every prospective student to be able to see them, whether or not they could get to an open day.

The challenge

Choosing a college is a big decision, and for most students it rests on a single open day visit, if they can make one at all. Land-based colleges feel this more than most: their animal units, farms, and specialist facilities are exactly what wins students over, and exactly what photographs and prospectus copy flatten.

Sparsholt saw the opportunity to put the campus itself in front of every applicant, adviser, and parent, and asked us what that could look like.

What we built

We built a photoreal, navigable tour of the campus, embedded directly on the college's own website. Visitors move through the facilities at their own pace from a small, clean menu of campus areas, and a careers map connects what they are seeing to the courses and careers it leads to.

The experience was designed to be genuinely inclusive. A dedicated SEND-friendly area lets students who find new environments difficult familiarise themselves with the campus before they ever set foot on it.

We also built an offline headset phase for ClassVR, so the college can take the campus with it to outreach events and schools, no connection required. A variant of the experience was then built for a partner college.

The outcome

The experience is doing its job well beyond the college's own website. The local authority is actively sharing it with schools and advisers, and the partner college variant has extended its reach further still.

The nicest signal came from the college itself, which asked to include Boundless branding in its own press coverage of the project.