Story Posted: Thursday, July 31st 2025
The term “digital media” is often associated with more traditional forms of content, like videos, animations, graphics, or online publications. These formats have well-established workflows, and most people recognize them when mentioned.
While we continue to create a lot of traditional content, our team has also been exploring and experimenting with a few lesser-known and more recent forms of media. In this article, we’ll walk through some of these approaches, how they work, and a few examples we’ve created along the way.
Virtual tours were primarily used in real estate, but during the pandemic, the need for self-guided walkthroughs in education began to grow. We’ve started to see more use cases in this context, often referred to as virtual field trips.
We currently offer two ways of creating virtual tours: using the Matterport platform, which creates high-quality walkthroughs that are quick to produce, or using professional 360 cameras to capture scenes and build custom tours.
Matterport is an out-of-the-box solution designed for real estate, offering ease of use and a polished look. It uses a proprietary camera, and software to capture rich, colourful 3d scans of environments in a quick and cost-effective way. To date, we’ve created over 100 projects with Matterport including but not limited to – the entirety of Allard Hall, the Sauder School of Business, SBQMI, UBC Robson square and much more.
360 image-based tours, on the other hand, require more hands-on creative planning and platform development, but allow greater flexibility in hosting and customization.
Example: UBC’s Pacific Museum of Earth virtual Matterport tour
The 3D Educational Resources project which happened between 2020 – 2022 is a 2 year TLEF initiative led by Dr. Suzie Lavallee from the Faculty of Forestry, in collaboration with our unit. Alongside several faculty collaborators, our team worked with technical consultants and UBC Work Learn students to build a robust workflow for reliably creating high-quality 3D objects using photogrammetry.
These models can be viewed online and came in especially handy during the pandemic. Students were able to engage with course materials remotely and interact with objects digitally. We see strong potential for continued use of this technology in education going forward.
This work eventually led us to begin experimenting with volumetric video, where we use camera arrays and custom workflows to capture 3D performances and environments in motion. It’s an exciting next step, moving from still 3D objects to dynamic, spatial video content that can be viewed and explored from multiple perspectives.
BTS of a photogrammetry setup:
3D model created using photogrammetry
We briefly touched on 360 technology while discussing virtual tours, but 360 cameras offer more than just still images. Most online platforms like YouTube and Vimeo support 360 videos, allowing viewers to explore the full scene by moving their device or using their mouse.
Use cases often focus on immersing viewers in a setting, such as walking through a forest canopy or experiencing a Point-of-View (POV) perspective, where the camera plays the role of the main character and actors interact with it directly. This lets viewers experience a scene as if they were part of it. We have several cameras for various use cases, more portable cameras like the GoPro or Insta360 X series are better for dynamic moving shots while larger cameras like the Insta360 Pro 2 are better for stationary shots.
Other applications include updating Google Street View, capturing immersive learning content, and showcasing campus or lab environments in new ways.
Example: UBC TreeWalk in 360
Artificial intelligence is changing the film and media production landscape and how we work, but its integration raises critical questions that the creative industry is still grappling with.
At UBC Studios, we’re taking a research-first approach to these questions. As seen in the below photo, our team has been working with Theatre and Film faculty member Patrick Pennefather on conducting hands-on experiments to understand how AI tools impact the creative process.
Rather than rushing in and blindly adopting AI tools, we’re testing various applications and documenting their effects and lessons learned. The hope is that this research will inform evidence-based guidelines for ethical AI use in digital media and ensure that our team at UBC Studios can harness AI’s potential while upholding the academic and artistic standards that define UBC.
Contact UBC Studios to learn more about our ongoing AI ethics research initiatives.
Behind the scenes of AI testing:
At the end of the day, while new technology is exciting and visually impressive, we don’t use immersive media just for the sake of it. We’re interested in these tools because they make sense for the project and bring real value to the viewer’s experience.
We hope this gave you a glimpse into some of the newer forms of media we’ve been experimenting with, and maybe even sparked an idea for your next project.
We’d like to also take this time to remember our late Senior Media Specialist Kirk Karasin, who will forever be remembered here at UBC Studios. He was and still is an integral part to our immersive media Journey at UBC Studios.
Find out more about Kirk’s legacy here.
If you’d like to start something with us, reach out at ubc.studios@ubc.ca to book your complimentary consultation.