Take a campus tour with Streetview!

Although the images were captured while the new Mountbatten Building was still (though not for much longer) under construction, Google Streetview provides an excellent tour around the ECS buildings on the University of Southampton Highfield Campus.

The tour begins from the Mountbatten Building on Salisbury Road. The Building is a £100M investment in UK science and technology and contains the latest clean room technology for silicon fabrication and nanotechnology. It is one of the UK's leading research facilities and provides clean room and lab space for researchers in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, the ECS Nano group and Communications group. Researchers in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group are also based in the building, along with researchers from the Optoelectronics Research Centre, which shares the technical facilities with ECS.

Walking east along Salisbury Road, you will pass Zepler Building, which is where our undergraduate students spend much of their time. You can walk by the two buildings at the corner of University Road and Burgess Road which house our ISIS, SENSe and EPE research groups, covering Information: Signals, Images and Systems, the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems, and Electrical Power Engineering. Also in view on the left as you turn right into University Road is the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory, one of only a handful in the UK which are equipped to carry out high-level testing and monitoring of electrical equipment. On the east of University Road as you walk towards the centre of campus you will pass a glass-fronted building which houses three research groups: Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia; Learning Societies Lab; and the Web Science Research Initiative.

ECS is fortunate that its buildings are grouped together and are also very close to the centre of the campus which contains all the facilities needed for student life in Southampton. As you carry on down University Road you will pass the University Library on your left, and the Students Union and Jubilee Sports Centre on your right. The Highfield Campus is only a short bus-ride from the centre of Southampton and many of the students live in Portswood, which has a wide variety of shops, as well as being only a 10-minute walk from the centre of the city.

Commenting on the technological achievement of Google Streetview, Chris Gutteridge, ECS Web Projects Manager, said: 'We are aware of the privacy and security concerns that have been raised by the advent in the UK of Google Streetview, but as computer scientists we can't help admiring the technology - it is very very cool!'

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, tel.023 8059 5453