HXRC Team: Capturing the King’s Road on a 360-degree camera

Sep 2, 2021

To preserve the historic locations of King’s Road, our summer trainee Laura Kankkunen headed out to capture them on a 360-degree camera.

A fishing hut viewed inside a 360-degree photo program.

A view of the Imperial Fishing Hut of tzar Alexander III, captured in the 360-degree software.

Text and photos by Laura Kankkunen

Hi, I’m Laura Kankkunen! I just started my 4th year in the XR Design program, and next year I’m going to graduate as an XR designer. This summer I did my first internship, which was working with the King’s Road project at the Helsinki XR Center. I was responsible mostly for the technical side of things, like photographing and filming with a special 360-degree camera.

The internship started in June, when Lumi was still also doing hers. Together, we travelled along the King’s Road: Renascence and shot 360-degree photos and videos of the historic destinations. We also had a DSLR camera with us, which I used to photograph interesting details. You can also read Lumi’s blog post on becoming a producer on King’s Road!

Visiting these interesting places was definitely memorable! Since we were mostly shooting outside, we were lucky to have sunny and warm weather, which created a lovely summer atmosphere in the photos. Though the direct sunlight shining into the camera lens wasn’t ideal, but having rain would have most likely delayed our schedule.

After the trip I first stitched the videos and photos together using the 360-degree camera’s own software. Then I started working on the 3D tours of the Kings’ Road destinations in the 3DVista Virtual Tour Pro program. I had already used the software for school, so figuring it out didn’t take too long. For the final result I drew a map of the King’s Road, stretching from Turku to St. Petersburg, which you can use to virtually visit the locations and see information about them in pop-up windows. The version I is not currently publicly available, but the work should continue next year!

Aside from the shooting trip I mostly worked independently, which made me miss working at the office and socialising. But at least during the weekly Teams meetings with the Helsinki XR Center team I got to participate in the friendly atmosphere. Overall I’m happy with the experience, and would recommend the Helsinki XR Center’s internships to others, too!

In-app illustration of a map of southern Finland. The King's Road stretches from Turku to St. Petersburg with other destinations along the way.
Partner: CBC 2014-2020 - South-East Finland - Russia

Funded by the European Union, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Finland.

To see previous news about our trainees’ projects, head over to the Trainee news section.

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