Development of panoramic virtual tours system based on low cost devices

Abstract

The virtual visit is a simulation of reality that allows virtually changing time or placing. Unlike this, virtual reality offers the possibility to associate the real world with the virtual world, while ensuring interactivity and an improvement in prospecting the reality. One of the most used form of virtual reality is the 360° panoramic imagery and video, currently in the market we can find many providers of panoramic cameras, going from costly professional cameras to the low cost consumer grade cameras. In addition, many software providers offers the virtual tours creation and visualisation, to our knowledge, only google street view offers full mapping functionalities, but the data capture and collection is an opaque operation. Generally, smartphones are equipped with positioning capabilities, based on sensors like gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometer used as compass and GPS, the integration of this data allow the estimation of the pose.This paper discusses the creation of an interactive virtual reality with 360° panoramic images with the possibility of automating its acquisition and integration in mapping environment by using smartphone positioning methods, while the panoramic images are taken using costumer grade camera, which composes a low cost system for acquiring and diffusing panoramic virtual tours map. The developed solution is a dynamic web interface using several open source libraries and programming tools.