Find your way the high-tech way

Find your way the high-tech way
Interactive map goes live at www.rice.edu

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

A few decades into the age of information, a map is no longer satisfied to be just a map. The online Rice campus map, for instance, aspires to more.

	Rice has launched an interactive map and virtual tour.

Go have a look here. Click around. Click a blue dot, and you’ll see a picture of the building it’s attached to. Click a name in the building list, and you’ll be taken to the building. (Virtually, of course.) Click down to street level (listed under “Related Information”), and drive along the tree-lined lanes.

It’s all so … Web 2.0. And it’s part of the grand plan to make Rice more accessible to everybody.

Sean Rieger, Rice’s director of Web development, and his team spent months building and testing the page, which sits atop a Google map and adds building details and photos to its standard street names and satellite views.

”We used Google programming tools to build it, starting with the latitude and longitude of every building on campus,” said Rieger. ”My staff worked really hard on that, looking at satellite imagery and plotting all those data points.”

The map, which went live on the Web this month, also allows users to turn on bus-stop markers and locate police call boxes throughout campus, as well as get the street views provided by Google — a source of some amusement among Web staffers.

”It’s hilarious — there’s a biker chasing the Google camera car. You can see him trailing the car, getting his workout,” said Rieger. ”We want to know who he is. He was obviously real excited about the street-level view.”

High on the list of features to come are cell phone access and GPS locator capabilities, so users can pinpoint their location on campus, along with more descriptive text to go with the building photos.

As Rice’s map becomes more interactive, it’s the next best thing to being there — literally.