Trail View is the result of applying an existing technology (Google Street View) to a brand campaign in support of the brand’s ongoing involvement in preserving the national parks.

By using Street View to create a first-of-its-kind, immersive platform, the site offers access to parks to countless people, allows hikers to preview perspective hikes in a real and unprecedented way, provides a valuable education tool, and starts to digitally preserve the parks in 360º. With the 2.0 site evolution, the platform now tells the story of Nature Valley’s preservation activity in a completely new and interactive way.

Trail View is an expandable platform, combining Google Street View API technologies with customized development to support:

o 8.8TB of video footage

o 12,885,315 image files

o 6GB xml data

o 172,639 GPS points

o 14,400,000,000 pixels of panoramic imagery

Our digital production company controls the entire stack for the platform — from server maintenance to code (frontend and CMS) updates.

Tech stack details:

• Backend

o Rackspace cloud server + load balancer

o Ubuntu for the servers Operating System

o MyQSL for content storage

o Ruby

o Ruby on Rails - framework for backend application

o FFMPEG - used for post processing of video footage

o ImageMagick - used for miscellaneous image processing tasks related to dynamic content

• Front End

o Coffeescript / Javascript

o CSS / SASS / CSS3

o TweenMax - for animations and transitions

o High Chart - for drawing interactive charts that are cross browser

o Google Maps API - for drawing the trails, placing the panoramas and callouts, and street view for the trail footage

o Spine.js for front end application architecture

o kprano - immersive 360º viewer for panoramic images

Trail View received a first round of funding in 2011 (500K) and a second round in 2012 (350K).

The goal for the platform is to continue to innovate toward preserving the national parks for generations to come. With each iteration, (3.0 brief is in development), we will evolve the platform to become an ever-more interactive hub for preservation activity. This means increasing social capabilities, exploring educational usage with partners such as NatGeo and the Smithsonian, and extending the platform into mobile, museum display and cultural channels.

The Trail View experience was a first-of-its-kind street view hiking experience on the trails, and to that end, informed Google’s own GoogleTrekker. Google has cited Nature Valley Trail View as a relevant predecessor, calling it "…the original unprecedented Trail View platform.”

To date, the goal was to increase the percentage of ratio of traffic to page visits by at least 25%; comparing the ratio for the six months of reporting pre-launch (191.9%) to the six months post-launch (402.4%), we came close (210.5%) to eclipsing the goal by a magnitude of ten (Facebook Insights). The platform was also featured in Google's Creative Sandbox and IDEO's lecture series. It has won 2 Gold Cannes Lions, every other major advertising award, been written about in The New York Times, FastCompany, and NBC News, among others.