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Web Scraper Utilizes Google Street View Images to Power a University Tour


Affiliations
1 Webb School of California, Claremont, CA 91711, United States
2 California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, 91768, United States
 

Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, college tours are no longer available, so many students have lost the opportunity to see their dream school’s campus. To solve this problem, we developed a product called “Virtourgo,” a university virtual tour website that uses Google Street View images gathered from a web scraper allowing students to see what college campuses are like even when tours are unavailable during the pandemic. The project consists of 3/4 parts: the web scraper script, the GitHub server, the Google Domains DNS Server, and the HTML files. Some challenges we met include scraping repeated pictures and letting the HTML dropdown menu jump to the correct location. We solved these by implementing Python and Javascript functions that specifically target such challenges. Finally, after experimenting with all the functions of the web scraper and website, we confirmed that it works as expected and can scrape and deliver tours of any university campus or public buildings we want.

Keywords

Web Scraping, Virtual Tour, Cloud Computing.
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  • Web Scraper Utilizes Google Street View Images to Power a University Tour

Abstract Views: 325  |  PDF Views: 140

Authors

Peiyuan Sun
Webb School of California, Claremont, CA 91711, United States
Yu Sun
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, 91768, United States

Abstract


Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, college tours are no longer available, so many students have lost the opportunity to see their dream school’s campus. To solve this problem, we developed a product called “Virtourgo,” a university virtual tour website that uses Google Street View images gathered from a web scraper allowing students to see what college campuses are like even when tours are unavailable during the pandemic. The project consists of 3/4 parts: the web scraper script, the GitHub server, the Google Domains DNS Server, and the HTML files. Some challenges we met include scraping repeated pictures and letting the HTML dropdown menu jump to the correct location. We solved these by implementing Python and Javascript functions that specifically target such challenges. Finally, after experimenting with all the functions of the web scraper and website, we confirmed that it works as expected and can scrape and deliver tours of any university campus or public buildings we want.

Keywords


Web Scraping, Virtual Tour, Cloud Computing.

References