Modern technology for opening, interpreting and using churches is getting easier and cheaper to use… 

Guest blogger Chris Jones from LeicesterPhotoDesign writes:

There are three things I have a passion for, photography, technology and churches. This may seem an odd mixture but bringing them together results in opening our churches to a wider audience.

Photography has always been an interest, and since 2008 a profession, I also have been visiting my local churches and completing photography of the interiors and exteriors for my own project on Leicestershire & Rutland churches and others across the UK. In 2012 I was approached by Google to launch their Google Business Views project with 360° imagery of ‘business interiors’ using their streetview technology – basically bringing their streetview views inside.

In August 2012 I completed the first church in the UK at St Mary de Castro in Leicester giving them a Google 360° virtual tour for their spire appeal. From there I have spoken at various conferences on this new technology and its place in helping churches gain a wider audience. Since then I have completed many churches with the 360° tours and recently we created a tour for St Wulfram’s in Grantham.

We were approached by St Wulfram’s to highlight their spire appeal and to create a 360° tour of the church for embedding on their website. Because this is Google’s streetview technology we can extend it from the street and ‘walk’ to the church as below, you can also make it full screen by clicking the ‘view larger map’ for a better effect. It also appears in Google Maps, Google search results and enables anyone from around the world to get a real insight into the church.

It also is easily embedded into websites and you can start the tour wherever you want to. We also advise adding some ‘life’ to 360° church tours, so at St Wulfram’s we organised the Cafe to be open and people (all faces are blurred for privacy) to be in the virtual tour to ensure that the church was not empty.

The photography took most of the day and over 2,000 images were taken to create the tour and it was on-line within a few days, as to cost I charge less than our commercial rates for churches as I have a real interest in them. There are also new enhancements being developed which I am really excited about. Moving around large virtual tours is a pleasure but can be tiresome clicking through all the arrows, what we wanted was a method to ‘jump’ to specific parts of the tour and have pop-ups and embedded information within the tours. This has now been accomplished and we are testing some new technology which allows this. You can see St Wulphram’s with and without this new feature here. At the moment it only works on desktops and laptops but smartphones and tablets will be supported shortly.

Technology is always moving on but at this moment we have some great tools to enable anyone from around the world to look around our heritage and churches like never before. I am sometimes questioned that “surely having such a tour means people would not bother to visit as they can now view it on-line”. I disagree, so many people look for for information on-line and many of our churches are locked or not easily accessible. This allows anyone to have a real insight into their local church or places they may want to visit. Perhaps more importantly your church is accessible to the worldwide public like never before. Google recently did a tour of Ankor Wat, now I know I am probably never going to physically get there, but at least now I can get better experience of this famous landmark.

From the church’s point of view: Don Sission from Silkstone All Saints has previously written about Google InsideView in his church. 

NCT Grants: we have given grants to both Leicester St Mary de Castro and Grantham St Wulfram. Find out more about our grants on our website.