Online Virtual Tourism Platform Based on VR Technology

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the development of emerging technologies have brought new challenges and opportunities to tourism. The tourism sector must rethink its relationship with consumers and leverage emerging technologies for business expansion and transformation. Under this circumstance, providing travelers with an immersive virtual environment to meet their travel needs through virtual reality (VR) technology is considered to be a sustainable way to develop tourism1. In this paper, an online virtual art museum travel platform is built based on VR technology, which allows users to roam in the virtual scene and interact with the objects in the scene from the first-person view. VR tourism that provides a highly realistic environment and user-driven interactive functions is regarded as a potential alternative for real-life tourism2, achieving the immersive roaming in the virtual environment. VR tourism alleviates the contradiction between constrained mobility and increased tourism willingness up against the COVID-19 pandemic, and has positive social significance.