Project Title: Interactive 360 Virtual Tour of the Peddrew-Yates Hall: A History of Inclusion of African-American Community at Virginia Tech
URL: https://vt-360.glitch.me/
Team: Taufiq Chowdhury, Yesrat Rahman, Pablo E. Vanegas
Virginia Tech has a long history of African American Community. Many important and significant moments of Black history have taken place in the university since its foundation. Although the university was founded in 1872, Black students were not allowed to study there until 1953. The most important African American history revolves around two iconic people who made a revolutionary impact on the VT history from that moment. They are Irving Peddew III, the first Black student who enrolled in VT, and Charlie Lee Yates, the first Black student to graduate from VT. In 2003, VT passed a resolution to rename the New Residence Hall West as the Peddrew-Yates Hall to honor the 50th anniversary celebration of Black students. Also, this hall is the home to the Ujima LLC, a Living Learning Community dedicated to the education and celebration of the Black experience. This community places a special emphasis on understanding the experience of African-Americans in VT. [1,2]
To honor and showcase the history of the African-American community, we created an interactive and immersive virtual tour of the Peddrew-Yates Hall. In this interactive virtual tour, users can experience immersive 360 videos in the background and interact with different aspects of Peddrew-Yates Hall, and learn about the struggles and sufferings that Irving Peddrew, Charlie Yates and all other Black students of VT went through since the 1950’s, and how it has changed over the years. Users can explore different locations in the building, listen to audio narration regarding the history of Peddrew-Yates, see images of Peddrew, Yates, and Ujima LLC and watch related videos.
Anyone interested in the history of African-American community at Virginia Tech will have a better understanding after taking the virtual tour. If the audience wants to expand their knowledge on the VT historical sites related to Black students, they can visit the external links at the end of the tour.
[1] https://vt.edu/about/locations/buildings/peddrew-yates-residence-hall.html
[2] https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2003/03/2003-47.html