My social science capstone or IQP was at the Monteverde, Costa Rica project center. Our sponsor was the Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserve (SER). As a whole, the SER plays a fundamental role within the local community, receiving nearly 40,000 visitors annually. But with COVID-19, there were serious economic repercussions for tourism-reliant communities like Monteverde when they couldn't receive visitors. Our goal was therefore to help the reserve create a virtual tour of the SER itself to curate their online presence, expand their outreach and promote further donations in the future.
We mainly designed our virtual tour based on data collected from past visitors, tour guides, and experts of the reserve - and as we developed the tour, we sent out drafts and collected survey feedback from users on social media like Instagram to identify possible areas of improvement.
We designed our tour using Google Street View to capture 360 shots at different locations. For the virtual tour itself, we used a free, open-source software called Lapentor so that our sponsor could continue to add to the tour in the future.
By the end, we hopefully provided the SER with a tour that highlights their best features and helps the reserve stand out as a unique attraction with its online presence.
Click here to see a video of the tour walkthrough, and here to read more about our project!
All credit for pictures of the reserve goes to our sponsor Walter Bello
