Touring Penn through your iPhone

High school students prone to wandering off during campus tours may have finally met their match.

uTourX, billed by its creators as “a brand new way to tour colleges,” is a new iPhone application that acts as a virtual tour guide for several U.S. college campuses. The application senses a user’s location via GPS and displays key information and trivia about nearby campus landmarks.

So far, tour information is available at Yale, Harvard, Stanford and MIT — and while it is not yet available for Penn, University officials say it could be a possibility in the future.

One prime feature of uTourX allows visitors to point their iPhone cameras to campus landmarks, and with GPS positioning data the app can show clickable white dots which lead to short blurbs and student-submitted commentary.

The app and its parent company, oSnapplications, were the brainchild of Yale sophomore Max Uhlenhuth, his sister Kasey and a high school friend.

“When I went to look at colleges, I usually ditched the tour group,” developer Kasey Uhlenhuth told the Yale Daily News. “With this application, I could have found a computer science tour of Yale, and focused on what I’m going to be majoring in.”

The beauty of uTourX, according to Uhlehuth, is that tours are “somewhat of an insider’s guide” to college life — all content is student-created.

“People are definitely looking for this information,” he said, “and it’s not really available anywhere else.”

Many students say they prefer traditional guided tours, however.

“There’s definitely a personal element [to guided tours],” said Wharton junior Ankur Sancheti. “Phones just can’t replace real people.”

And Jack Kim, another Wharton junior, said he felt an iPhone tour would verge on too informative.

Also, it is more confusing because “you can’t ask questions,” he said.

Interested campus organizations can raise money by designing custom tours of their colleges and receive royalties when these tours are sold online.

While Penn is not yet included on uTourX, the University offers Discover Penn, a similar service with free cell phone tours at various campus landmarks.

At 15 different sites around campus, visitors can call numbers marked by red signs and receive brief recorded commentary and analysis from professors, architects and other experts.

Penn’s cell phone tours have been used over 2,000 times since their addition last September, according to Taylor Berkowitz, senior planner for Facilities and Real Estate Services.

She added that the University would consider creating an iPhone application similar to uTourX.

“We’re always open to new technology,” she said. “We’d definitely want to investigate this service.”

Right now, uTourX is pending approval on the Apple iPhone App Store.

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