Photorealistic True-Dimensional Visualization of Remote Panoramic Views for VR Headsets

© 2023 IEEE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Virtual Reality headsets have evolved to include unprecedented display quality. Meantime, they have become light-weight, wireless and low-cost, which has opened to new applications and a much wider audience. Photo-based omnidirectional imaging has also developed, becoming directly exploitable for VR, with their combination proven suitable for: remote visits and realistic scene reconstruction, operator’s training and control panels, surveillance and e-tourism. There is however a limited amount of scientific work assessing VR experience and user’s performance in photo-based environment representations. This paper focuses on assessing the effect of photographic realism in VR when observing real places through a VR headset, for two different pixel-densities of the display, environment types and familiarity levels. Our comparison relies on the observation of static three-dimensional and omnidirectional photorealistic views of environments. The aim is to gain an insight about how photographic texture can affect perceived realness, sense of presence and provoked emotions, as well as perception of image-lighting and actual space dimension (true-dimension). Two user studies are conducted based on subjective rating and measurements given by users to a number of display and human factors. The display pixel-density affected the perceived image-lighting and prevailed over better lighting specs. The environment illumination and distance to objects generally played a stronger role than display. The environment affected the perceived image-lighting, spatial presence, depth impression and specific emotions. Distances to a set of objects were generally accurately estimated. Place familiarity enhanced perceived realism and presence. They confirmed some previous studies, but also introduced new elements.Peer reviewe

The Impact of Social Media Marketing on Promoting the Cultural Heritage Tourism: A Case Study of Portugal

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Driven Marketing, specialization in Digital Marketing and AnalyticsThis research is the result of an exploratory and descriptive investigation that focuses on analyzing 21 social media profiles of entities related to the cultural and heritage tourism sectors in Portugal. The purpose is to gather concrete data and observe the most successful social media marketing strategies employed by these entities. The research aims to address two main research questions: “How can social media marketing contribute to the building and strengthening of Portuguese Cultural Heritage and Tourism?” and “How can marketers incorporate virtual reality into a marketing strategy in the cultural tourism and heritage sectors and derive value from it?”. Therefore, the intention is to explore how social media platforms can be leveraged to promote and attract visitors to Portuguese cultural heritage sites and tourism destinations. By analyzing the social media profiles of relevant entities, the research seeks to identify effective strategies that contribute to the overall promotion and enhancement of Portugal's cultural heritage and tourism offerings. The research also aims to investigate how virtual reality can be integrated into marketing strategies within the cultural tourism and heritage sectors. Virtual reality has the potential to provide immersive and interactive experiences, allowing potential visitors to engage with cultural and heritage sites virtually. The study seeks to explore how marketers can harness virtual reality technologies to create valuable and engaging content that entices visitors and enhances their overall experience. By examining the social media profiles and activities of these entities, the research aims to provide insights into successful social media marketing practices, as well as explore the potential of virtual reality in marketing strategies for cultural tourism and heritage sectors. The findings of this research can help tourism organizations understand the impact of consumers' behavior and preferences and guide them in making informed decisions about their marketing and promotional efforts

Implementation of computer visualisation in UK planning

PhD ThesisWithin the processes of public consultation and development management, planners are required to consider spatial information, appreciate spatial transformations and future scenarios. In the past, conventional media such as maps, plans, illustrations, sections, and physical models have been used. Those traditional visualisations are at a high degree of abstraction, sometimes difficult to understand for lay people and inflexible in terms of the range of scenarios which can be considered. Yet due to technical advances and falling costs, the potential for computer based visualisation has much improved and has been increasingly adopted within the planning process. Despite the growth in this field, insufficient consideration has been given to the possible weakness of computerised visualisations. Reflecting this lack of research, this study critically evaluates the use and potential of computerised visualisation within this process. The research is divided into two components: case study analysis and reflections of the author following his involvement within the design and use of visualisations in a series of planning applications; and in-depth interviews with experienced practitioners in the field. Based on a critical review of existing literature, this research explores in particular the issues of credibility, realism and costs of production. The research findings illustrate the importance of the credibility of visualisations, a topic given insufficient consideration within the academic literature. Whereas the realism of visualisations has been the focus of much previous research, the results of the case studies and interviews with practitioners undertaken in this research suggest a ‘photo’ realistic level of details may not be required as long as the observer considers the visualisations to be a credible reflection of the underlying reality. Although visualisations will always be a simplification of reality and their level of realism is subjective, there is still potential for developing guidelines or protocols for image production based on commonly agreed standards. In the absence of such guidelines there is a danger that scepticism in the credibility of computer visualisations will prevent the approach being used to its full potential. These findings suggest there needs to be a balance between scientific protocols and artistic licence in the production of computer visualisation. In order to be sufficiently credible for use in decision making within the planning processes, the production of computer visualisation needs to follow a clear methodology and scientific protocols set out in good practice guidance published by professional bodies and governmental organisations.Newcastle upon Tyne for awarding me an International Scholarship and Alumni Bursar

Impact of Imaging and Distance Perception in VR Immersive Visual Experience

Virtual reality (VR) headsets have evolved to include unprecedented viewing quality. Meanwhile, they have become lightweight, wireless, and low-cost, which has opened to new applications and a much wider audience. VR headsets can now provide users with greater understanding of events and accuracy of observation, making decision-making faster and more effective. However, the spread of immersive technologies has shown a slow take-up, with the adoption of virtual reality limited to a few applications, typically related to entertainment. This reluctance appears to be due to the often-necessary change of operating paradigm and some scepticism towards the "VR advantage". The need therefore arises to evaluate the contribution that a VR system can make to user performance, for example to monitoring and decision-making. This will help system designers understand when immersive technologies can be proposed to replace or complement standard display systems such as a desktop monitor. In parallel to the VR headsets evolution there has been that of 360 cameras, which are now capable to instantly acquire photographs and videos in stereoscopic 3D (S3D) modality, with very high resolutions. 360° images are innately suited to VR headsets, where the captured view can be observed and explored through the natural rotation of the head. Acquired views can even be experienced and navigated from the inside as they are captured. The combination of omnidirectional images and VR headsets has opened to a new way of creating immersive visual representations. We call it: photo-based VR. This represents a new methodology that combines traditional model-based rendering with high-quality omnidirectional texture-mapping. Photo-based VR is particularly suitable for applications related to remote visits and realistic scene reconstruction, useful for monitoring and surveillance systems, control panels and operator training. The presented PhD study investigates the potential of photo-based VR representations. It starts by evaluating the role of immersion and user’s performance in today's graphical visual experience, to then use it as a reference to develop and evaluate new photo-based VR solutions. With the current literature on photo-based VR experience and associated user performance being very limited, this study builds new knowledge from the proposed assessments. We conduct five user studies on a few representative applications examining how visual representations can be affected by system factors (camera and display related) and how it can influence human factors (such as realism, presence, and emotions). Particular attention is paid to realistic depth perception, to support which we develop target solutions for photo-based VR. They are intended to provide users with a correct perception of space dimension and objects size. We call it: true-dimensional visualization. The presented work contributes to unexplored fields including photo-based VR and true-dimensional visualization, offering immersive system designers a thorough comprehension of the benefits, potential, and type of applications in which these new methods can make the difference. This thesis manuscript and its findings have been partly presented in scientific publications. In particular, five conference papers on Springer and the IEEE symposia, [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], and one journal article in an IEEE periodical [6], have been published

Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment

Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub-problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX). User interaction, with both the virtual environment and its digital contents, is one of the main elements affecting UX. With respect to this I focused on one of the most recent and promising approaches: the natural interaction, which is based on the idea that persons need to interact with technology in the same way they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life. Then, I focused on the problem of presenting, displaying and communicating contents. VLE represent an ideal presentation layer, being multiplatform hypermedia applications where users are free to interact with the virtual reconstructions by choosing their own visiting path. Cultural items, embedded into the environment, can be accessed by users according to their own curiosity and interests, with the support of narrative structures, which can guide them through the exploration of the virtual spaces, and conceptual maps, which help building meaningful connections between cultural items. Thus, VLE environments can even be seen as visual interfaces to DBs of cultural contents. Users can navigate the VE as if they were browsing the DB contents, exploiting both text-based queries and visual-based queries, provided by the re-contextualization of the objects into their original spaces, whose virtual exploration can provide new insights on specific elements and improve the awareness of relationships between objects in the database. Finally, I have explored the mobile dimension, which became absolutely relevant in the last period. Nowadays, off-the-shelf consumer devices as smartphones and tablets guarantees amazing computing capabilities, support for rich multimedia contents, geo-localization and high network bandwidth. Thus, mobile devices can support users in mobility and detect the user context, thus allowing to develop a plethora of location-based services, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits and cultural or tourist sites according to visitors’ personal interest and curiosity

Proceedings of the 9th Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ASCAAD) international conference 2021 (ASCAAD 2021): architecture in the age of disruptive technologies: transformation and challenges.

The ASCAAD 2021 conference theme is Architecture in the age of disruptive technologies: transformation and challenges. The theme addresses the gradual shift in computational design from prototypical morphogenetic-centered associations in the architectural discourse. This imminent shift of focus is increasingly stirring a debate in the architectural community and is provoking a much needed critical questioning of the role of computation in architecture as a sole embodiment and enactment of technical dimensions, into one that rather deliberately pursues and embraces the humanities as an ultimate aspiration

Augmented reality and scene examination

The research presented in this thesis explores the impact of Augmented Reality on human performance, and compares this technology with Virtual Reality using a head-mounted video-feed for a variety of tasks that relate to scene examination. The motivation for the work was the question of whether Augmented Reality could provide a vehicle for training in crime scene investigation. The Augmented Reality application was developed using fiducial markers in the Windows Presentation Foundation, running on a wearable computer platform; Virtual Reality was developed using the Crytek game engine to present a photo-realistic 3D environment; and a video-feed was provided through head-mounted webcam. All media were presented through head-mounted displays of similar resolution to provide the sole source of visual information to participants in the experiments. The experiments were designed to increase the amount of mobility required to conduct the search task, i.e., from rotation in the horizontal or vertical plane through to movement around a room. In each experiment, participants were required to find objects and subsequently recall their location. It is concluded that human performance is affected not merely via the medium through which the world is perceived but moreover, the constraints governing how movement in the world is controlled