Enhanced Low-cost Web-based Virtual Tour Experience for Prospective Students

Abstract

This paper presents a web-based Virtual Tour (VT) pipeline to allow organisations to develop a VT experience rapidly, which integrates a collaborative virtual environment with avatars and a 3D Environment to provide visitors an interactive and shareable experience. Users from an organisation with minimal coding experience can develop a low-cost web-based VT using a 360 camera, the Open Source tools Marzipano and Hubs, the developed software framework and documentation directly from the GitHub repository. The contribution of this work is both the software framework for use with the Marzipano, Mozilla Hubs tool and Tin Can API. A University case study along with a user evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.