A Virtual Tour at the University of the Balearic Islands (end-of-degree project)

Post by: LTIM
15 July 2022
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The end-of-degree project “A Virtual Tour at the University of the Balearic Islands” (“Visita virtual a la Universitat de les Illes Balears”) was defended by Jaume Mesquida Lanas with the supervision of Antoni Oliver and Antoni Bibiloni.

Student Jaume Mesquida using his application.

This project presents an interactive tour at the UIB, implemented as a 360-degree hypervideo in a web application with an immersive environment. This tour showcases several buildings of the University and specifies the studies that are taught there.

Equirectangular projection of a still of a 360-degree video.

360-degree videos are recorded with special gear, such as cameras with two wide objectives, to produce videos that are recorded in all the directions. These videos, which represent a sphere, are projected with the equirectangular projection so they can be stored like any other regular video, and then they are used as a texture inside a sphere so they immerse the user in the content.

An editor for the tour had to be developed: how the videos relate to each other and which points of interest appear at which point in time (and space!) of each video. This requires the use of special calculations to consider the special characteristics of the spherical videos.

Formula for the linear interpolation between two points over a great circle.

Furthermore, an analysis tool was developed that shows which videos are viewed the most and, more importantly, the orientations of the users’ heads in each video (or grouped by video type, as shown below), and the current orientation over time in a specific video. These initial results are in line of the results obtained in the thesis of Antoni Oliver, which show that users in point videos are more disperse than in route videos.