Recommending Multimedia Information in a Virtual Han Chang’an City Roaming System

This article presents a roaming system of Han Chang’an City, with both virtual reality (VR) technology and information recommendation technology. Nowadays, some new research issues in the cultural heritage domain can be achieved with the rapid development of VR technology. The ancient site of Han Chang’an City, as one of the most valuable and significant cultural heritages in China, attracts more and more attention around the world. To let more people understand Han Chang’an City and reproduce its beauty, in this article, we propose a virtual roaming system combined with information recommendation technology. First, Unity3D is selected as the three-dimensional platform to design the scenario model of Han Chang’ an City, and the virtual scene is reconstructed with VR technology, according to real historical data; then, the dynamic information recommendation module is designed to recommend hot topic information and personalized information. The former is obtained through web crawlers, including the latest released news related to Han Chang’an City for users. The latter is generated by the proposed hybrid recommendation algorithm, which combines explicit and implicit feedback. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated on two datasets. Finally, we show some results of our system test. Our proposed system is released online now, and users can wander in the scene any time.