A virtual stroll down the Tempe campus may soon be possible courtesy of Google Street View. ASU is in the running for Google Maps’ U.S. Street View Special Collections contest, and is up against four other universities to be featured with a ground-level view of the campus online.

Being the first university to be highlighted on Google Street View would not only be incredibly awesome, it would give ASU students a chance to be incredibly creative.

Standing in view of the Google Street View Trike could get your image immortalized on the Internet, and if the ASU community coordinates its outfits, the University view could be epic.

So, if the Trike cruises down Cady Mall, we all could don our Sun Devil gear, or be a little more innovative.

Here are some ways we could spice up the campus’ online image:

• Turn ASU into living artwork via tableaux vivants. Students and staff can recreate famous masterpieces like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous mural “The Last Supper” could be reset in front of Danforth Chapel, and Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Man” could be replicated on the Pringle-like structures in front of the Memorial Union. We could even use the fountain in between to reinterpret “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. Scatter well-known paintings around campus and ASU’s art appreciation class enrollment would skyrocket.

• Turn ASU into a massive scavenger hunt with the help of Nickelodeon. We place blue paw prints around campus leading to the secret location of Barack Obama’s honorary degree and give everyone the chance to “Blue skidoo” looking for it. Think you’re too old for “Blue’s Clues?” Think again. You’ll be humming Blue’s “got a letter conga” all day long.

• Surreptitiously place life-like alien statues and spacecrafts around campus and walk around with dazed “creatures-from-outer-space-just-probed-my-brain” looks on our faces. Be prepared for alien hunters to show up on campus and conspiracy theories to abound.

• Put a massive black curtain up around Barrett, The Honors College. It may not make the whole campus more interesting, but we all know that place is just too elite to be seen by commoners’ eyes on the World Wide Web. For security purposes, there should be a bouncer and a velvet rope surrounding the buildings, too.

• Have everyone — all 40,000-plus enrolled at the campus — dress up in striped clothing. Then we’ll dress Derek Glasser up in a red-and–white-striped shirt, jeans, a reverse Santa hat and Harry Potter glasses, and have him subtly intermixed in the crowd. That’s right, we just created the largest-scale Where’s Waldo hunt ever. If a Where’s Waldo recreation isn’t enough to prompt a massive push to get Google here, we don’t know what will. ASU hasn’t snagged the prize yet; there is still a lot of voting to be done. Fortunately, you can vote as many times as you like at http://tr.im/asugoogle.