All hands on deck for Streetview

The Wageningen lipdub (has more than 100,000 Youtube hits since then) made its appearance two years ago. But the student recruitment department decided it was time for a new stunt. And what better time to do this than during the AID when almost a thousand willing actors were at your beck and call? And so an uninformed visitor to the Forum saw at about half past one yesterday afternoon how hundreds of first year students ‘stringed’ themselves together through the entire building, each about four metres from the next, all ready to shoot with the camera in their cell phones. Their aim: to make a Streetview application which can be used to design a tour of Forum, Leeuwenborch, Bongerd and the routes in between. ‘This will be something new,’ says Matthijs Roumen of advertising agency Tribewise, the brain behind the project. ‘Nowadays, you can also get into certain buildings such as the White House with Streetview from Google Maps. So we thought to ourselves: why don’t we do something like that too?’ With the hundreds of photographs taken at this event, Roumen hopes that he will be able to provide a tour of the main teaching buildings, like those in Google Streetview. In addition, a montage of the images will be used for a short video film. This can be viewed in a few weeks’ time via Facebook, provided that he receives enough photographs. ‘The turnout was good,’ says Roumen. ‘But some people seem to have problems sending relatively large photographs with their cell phones. We hope they will still do it, though.’ One person he can count on is Theo. Armed with his cell phone, this first year student of Soil, water and atmosphere had stationed himself firmly in location F154. ‘Since I’ve been asked to do this, I do it,’ he said with a shrug. Streetview seemed to him like a good way to let interested secondary school students have a look at the building. ‘An initial introduction, in any case. Actually, you have to be here to see it, of course. Such a beautiful building.’ Theo