Development and Evaluation of an Interactive 360 ° Virtual Tour for Tourist Destinations
Aznoora Osman, Nadia Abdul Wahab, Mohammad Hafiz Ismail · 2009
This paper describes the development and evaluation of a virtual tour prototype for tourist destinations. Four interesting destinations in Perlis, located in the northern region of Malaysia were selected. It allows the users to navigate and to listen to the background sounds and narration, as well as to read brief information about each place. Each panorama contains hotspots that enable the users to further explore the surroundings All pictures were combined using photo stitching technique to produce panoramic images. The planar panorama was set as the panorama type. The first usability test was conducted to gain user feedbacks towards the virtual tour and to make refinement to the prototype. The second usability test was intended to measure its usability in terms of user satisfaction and effectiveness. The virtual tour received positive feedbacks and all participants agreed that it could attract tourists to visit the actual place.