College Virtual Tour using Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual reality has become one of the highly interesting and popular fields. Also in recent times, the concept of the metaverse and its idea of a virtual world is being spread rapidly. As the technological connotation of the term VR has been changing and encompasses various VR systems with different capabilities, it has also paved a way for virtual tourism. The current pandemic situation made people around the world stay inside their houses, which has led to the growth of virtual tourism. Yet the usage of VR is not as wide as its reach. The main reason for VR’s less usage is its affordability, not everyone could afford a VR headset. The objective of this project is to create an immersive virtual tour of the college that can be used by even an individual without any proper gear. Virtual tours are a way for people to experience and explore a place that exists in reality as a physical space via the internet. The old techniques of the virtual tour are either of a pre-recorded video form or just some collections of 360-degree images. To improve the experience, we are creating a 3D virtual environment that the user can access without any restrictions. The user can download the file and can run the program on their desired platform

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

Computer Generated scenes have a wider range of audience and VR is another field that attracts the viewers. Creating an environment is not an easy task. It takes a lot of time and skills to create a 3D replica of a real-life environment. Integrating VR into these computer-generated environments could bring much excellence to the technology. Due to the improvements in the software and in the field of VR, the virtual tour could give the viewers a whole new experience.

The objective of this project is to create a virtual tour that allows the user to view the college in a 360-degree view and navigate them into the college. Also, this project helps those people who are far away from the college to have a look at the facilities and infrastructure before admitting their child to do their studies. The main objective is to make the idea and experience of VR easier and efficient to all.

II. EXISTING SYSTEM

Photo Stitching is one of the easiest and widely used methods for a virtual tour. Photo stitching combines the multiple photos with overlapping fields and produce a panorama image.  In simple words, it is the process of taking pictures in different directions from the same point to create a 360-degree image. In some cases, a pre-recorded video is played when the viewer clicks any trigger points. These pre-recorded videos are also called as delayed feedbacks. Even though VR is integrated to these methods, the experience of the viewer is not satisfied and they still have many questions for which they have to make a direct contact with a faculty member. Fig 1.1 shows the implementation of these existing system in some foreign universities. An easy way to comply with IJRASET paper formatting requirements is to use this document as a template and simply type your text into it.

III. PROPOSED SYSTEM

The system that is being proposed here is a compatible, efficient and an exciting way to show the virtual tour of the college. To create an exterior mock up model of the college many references are collected as pictures. These pictures are taken using a high-definition camera so that the references can be viewed clearly at the time of modelling. The interior references are also captured in the same way. Once the references are captured, they are used to create the 3D model of the college using 3Ds Max. After modelling the college, the model is imported into Unreal Engine for adding materials and textures to the model. Twinmotion, a tool that is built upon Unreal Engine, is used to add elements and textures. Then to make the experience better sound effects and some other animations like human interactions are added to the project. Now this can be easily viewed using a basic VR headset. If a viewer doesn’t have any VR headset, they will have an option to have a tour just using their PC.

A. Twinmotion

Twinmotion is an open-source powerful visualization tool. It is built over the Unreal engine, which makes the workflow much easier. The developed 3D models are uploaded into Twinmotion in just one click. The freshly imported model won’t be having any material or textures added. Now twinmotion allows us to add thousands of textures and materials from its huge open-source library. It also allows the addition of materials and textures that are collected from other sources. Twinmotion is a very lightweight software compared to Unreal. So, the chances of twinmotion to crash are very low. After making all the exterior and interior changes twinmotion VR feature can be used to view the model in an immersive way.

B. Flow Diagram

Fig 1.2 shows the workflow of the project. This is to understand the process went through in creating the final result of the project. First, reference collections in the form of pictures come under pre-processing. This includes taking pictures of the exterior, interior and all the assets that are present. Then with the reference, mock-up 3D models are created in 3Ds max. These models are then imported into Unreal Engine to make it more realistic with textures and lighting. If the UE4 crashes, then a lighter version called Twinmotion is used for texturing and animations. Finally, after creating all the assets and VR environment the application is packed and exported for the user

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2024 M. Krithika, P. Rajeswari, P. Thilakaveni. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.