New on CD: the Notre Dame campus
by Phil Sicuso
Nudge your mouse forward and click — you’ve leaped halfway across the South Quad.
A couple of more clicks and you materialize inside DeBartolo Hall. A few more and you’re standing behind Saint Edward’s Hall. And everywhere you go, a turn of the wrist gives you a 360-degree pan of the scenery.
"This is Notre Dame," a new CD-ROM produced by the admissions office, provides a detailed, if sometimes dizzying, virtual tour of campus. It would probably be welcome addition to any Domer’s software collection, but you can get one only if you’re a high school student interested in enrolling or a high school guidance counselor interested in adding it to your school’s college materials.
As you take the CD-ROM’s virtual tour, a parallel screen displays an overhead map, orienting you to where things are in relation to one another. If mouse-driven strolling, accomplished by pointing and clicking at locations off in the distance, becomes tiring, an extensive index of campus sites allows you to jump directly to new locations. You can even look around inside the Basilica or see a classroom or two in certain academic buildings like the College of Business Administration.
Also on the disk are more than 100 video clips of faculty, alumni, students and administrators talking about the First Year of Studies Program, the Notre Dame "family" and other characteristics of the University. There’s also literature about academics, spirituality, athletics, student life and international studies.
The Notre Dame admissions office will mail the disk free to potential students and high school guidance offices upon request (contact them via e-mail at admissio.1@nd.edu). All admissions acceptance letters include an order form.
The CD-ROM comes complete with all needed software, but you will need a fairly new computer to run it. Hardware requirements include a minimum Pentium (or the non-Intel equivalent) processor and at least 20 MB of free space on your hard drive.