XOOM: An end-user development tool for web-based wearable immersive virtual tours

Abstract

XOOM is a novel interactive tool that allows non ICT-specialists to create web-based applications of Wearable Immersive Virtual Reality (WIVR) technology that use 360° realistic videos as interactive virtual tours. These applications are interesting for various domains that range from gaming, entertainment, cultural heritage, and tourism to education, professional training, therapy and rehabilitation. 360° interactive videos are displayed on smartphones placed on head-mounted VR viewers. Users explore the virtual environment and interact with active elements through head direction and movements. The virtual scenarios can be seen also on external displays (e.g., TV monitors or projections) to enable other users to participate in the experience, and to control the VR space if needed, e.g., for education, training or therapy purposes. XOOM provides the functionality to create applications of this kind, import 360° videos, concatenate them, and superimpose active elements on the virtual scenes, so that the resulting environment is more interactive and is customized to the requirement of a specific domain and user target. XOOM also supports automatic data gathering and visualizations (e.g., through heat-maps) of the users’ experience, which can be inspected for analytics purposes, as well as for user evaluation (e.g., in education, training, or therapy contexts). The paper describes the design and implementation of XOOM, and reports a case study in the therapeutic context.