Virtual Walk in the Digitised Space
The eLearning Department of the Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) has created a new service to present, virtually walk around and interactively explore real spaces and special environments. High-resolution, real 3D and 360° spherical panorama pictures are taken of the target spaces (to be explored). These pictures are postprocessed by a content editor developed by MTA SZTAKI and can be accessed via a multiplatform (Web, mobile, VR) player on various devices.
The creation of the service “Virtual walk” was preceded by a multi-stage research-development project. This novel service exploits the state-of-the-art capabilities of the latest IT devices and satisfies the user expectations at a high level. The service was evaluated within various areas (industry, economy, education, science, tourism and knowledge dissemination) and target user groups (addressing both younger and older generations) during the development.
The new service can be used both with 2D and 3D display devices. Although 2D displays are more widespread the virtual tour is especially spectacular on 3D displays. Even 5-6 rooms/parts can be nested together to accomodate the virtual walk whereas an interactive map can facilitate the orientation. The movement between the rooms and the interaction within a room is determined by the control facilities of the applied display. In case of computers, the control is represented by the keyboard and the mouse.
The novel service can be applied for several purposes depending on the specific needs:
- presenting locations hard to reach,
- presenting environments requiring special clothing or imposing strict local rules,
- presenting locations where persistent work largely restricts visits,
- presenting temporarily available contents,
- adding multilingual, complementary multimedia contents to present real environments in a more detailed, diverse and novel way.
Highlighted references:
- 3D and 2D presentation of the joint Industry 4.0 Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence of MTA SZTAKI and the Széchenyi István University in Győr
- interactive exploration of the caves in Lillafüred
- 2D virtual exhibition of the Ferencváros Local History Collection
“Virtual walks” offer user-friendly, complex services which help business partners to efficiently reach their dissemination goals by implementing various features in several domains.