GAVIN: A new platform for enriching 3D virtual indoor navigation with social-based geotags

Abstract

Social Networks, geotags, and Virtual Reality (VR) are parts of the everyday life of most of the people in the world. In particular, geotags represents a way to discover places through metadata added to media. At the same time, VR reproduces with high accuracy real places that we can navigate through a browser or a 3D visor. In this paper, we present GAVIN to fill the gap between social media geotagging and Virtual Indoor Navigation. GAVIN is a platform for the navigation of virtual environments able to exploit BIM Digital Twins and geolocated data coming from different sources and, in particular, from the social experience bounded to a real/virtual place. In the paper we provide design and implementation details on the GAVIN platform, and we present some performance evaluations.