Oculus Rift lets students take virtual tours of colleges

YouVisit co-founder Endri Tolka uses Oculus Rift to demonstrate one of the company's virtual college tours. YouVisit co-founder Endri Tolka uses Oculus Rift to demonstrate one of the company's virtual college tours. Photo: Photo By YouVisit, YouVisit Photo: Photo By YouVisit, YouVisit Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Oculus Rift lets students take virtual tours of colleges 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

The Facebook-owned Oculus Rift has excited the video game world, but an online company that specializes in college tours is demonstrating the wider potential of immersive virtual reality.

YouVisit of New York has designed Oculus Rift tours of more than 1,000 colleges.

"Matching up such a cool, seemingly futuristic technological experience with Yale's neo-gothic campus might seem like a strange combination, but I found they fit together perfectly," Mark Dunn, Yale University's director of outreach and recruitment, said in an e-mail.

Although the headgear is only in a prototype stage, and Yale won't have one until at least the end of summer, Dunn said the Oculus Rift tour would be perfect for recruiting events. And that could be a boon for high school students - and their parents - who face the big decision about choosing the right college to attend.

"It's very expensive and time consuming to just go out and visit all the schools somebody is interested in," said YouVisit CEO Abi Mandelbaum.

Instead, he said, "you're able to transport yourself and feel like you're actually there."

Facebook last week closed its $2 billion purchase of Oculus VR, the Irvine startup developing the Oculus Rift goggles. The device covers the wearer's eyes, while motion sensors detect the direction the wearer is looking, completing the illusion of being in a different location.

Last week, Oculus started shipping the second generation of Rift prototypes for developers to work on virtual reality applications, but the company has not said when it will sell a consumer-ready product.

However, Facebook is reportedly working with electronics giant Samsung to bring Oculus technology to mobile devices. And rivals Google and Sony are also working on their own virtual reality technology.

So far, much of the development for Oculus goggles has centered on video games. But in explaining his huge bet on Oculus, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he believes the company could "create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate."

YouVisit's Oculus campus tours is one of the first non-gaming applications to surface.

More than 9 million students from 120 countries have taken a free YouVisit tour since the company launched in 2009, Mandelbaum said.

Mandelbaum and his co-founders all came from outside of the U.S. and got the idea for virtual tours while studying at Brandeis University.

"We always had this thought that there might be a better way for international students and out-of-state students to get a better feel for what it was like to study at different college campuses," Mandelbaum said.

The site's tours show the campus with photos, 360-degree panoramas and videos. But the Rift provides a better feel for what it's like to stand in the middle of a school's library or in the quad, which could become one more factor high school students might consider when they are narrowing their college choices.

YouVisit's Yale tour offers dozens of exterior and interior views, including the engineering labs and the campus paper's newsroom.

During a demonstration, the views became quite realistic when Ebbe Altberg, CEO of San Francisco's Linden Lab, donned an Oculus Rift. He knows about virtual reality - Linden Lab is also working on an Oculus Rift version of its 11-year-old online world Second Life.

"Oh my, I'm back in college," Altberg said as he looked all around a sparse Yale dorm room.

Yale's Mark Dunn said campus visits elicit similar "ooohs and ahhhs," but the Oculus Rift "produces the same sense of wonder, without the distance and artifice associated with clicking through images on a browser."

Although the university's plans are not yet definitive, Dunn said Yale might ask campus representatives to bring an Oculus Rift when they meet students this fall, especially when reaching out to promising students who don't have the same resources as other students.

"I also think we will want to feature the headset during some of our on-campus outreach and recruitment events," he said. "This might seem counterintuitive, but our existing YouVisit content includes many campus spaces that we can't normally open up to visitors."

Although Dunn said a virtual tour can't replace an actual tour, which includes the chance to ask questions of students and admissions officers, a virtual tour station "would be its own attraction, and the headset itself is just so cool, it's easy to imagine high school seniors lining up for hours just to try it on."