St. Pete Clearwater CVB Virtual Tour case study

Situation: The St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) promotes the 26 communities in Pinellas County to visitors throughout the world. The CVB was looking for ways to provide visitors a vivid visual representation of the destination, known as Florida’s Beach. It wanted an expandable, stand-alone interactive experience that supported a wide range of media and was fully compatible with all versions of Windows and Mac operating systems.

 

Solution:
To meet the CVB’s technical requirements, Blue Reef developed the Florida’s Beach Experience (FBX). The FBX is a combination of 360° virtual reality movies, streaming video and audio, Flash, still images and database-driven information, all integrated into a single user experience inside an original branded interface.

To create a streamlined user experience, Blue Reef designed the FBX as a single window application with no pop-up windows to obscure the view. Within the FBX interface, the user can see locations relative to one another using a graphical map, see a visual display of their current location and read information pertinent to that location. Integrating navigation, multimedia content and textual information into a single environment is one of the greatest advantages of this technology. The FBX is also XML enabled, which allows navigation and content to be dynamically driven via an online database. This capability allows changes to be made without modifying the base application.

 

Results:
The FBX has been extremely well received by both consumers and the trade, winning a 2003 Gold District Addy for Consumer Interactive Media from the American Advertising Federation. The CVB routinely receives positive customer feedback on the application and estimates the FBX has been viewed over 1,000,000 times since its launch.