Personalized Real-Time Virtual Tours In Places With Cultural Interest

Abstract

Virtual tours using drones enhance the experience the users perceive from a place with cultural interest. Drones equipped with 360o cameras perform real-time video streaming of the cultural sites. The user preferences about each monument type should be considered in order to decide the appropriate flying route for the drone. This article describes a scheme for supporting personalized real-time virtual tours at sites with cultural interest using drones. The user preferences are modeled using the MPEG-21 and the MPEG-7 standards, while Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies are used for metadata structure and semantics. The Metadata-Aware Analytic Network Process (MANP) algorithm is proposed in order to weigh the user preferences for each monument type. Subsequently, the Trapezoidal Fuzzy Topsis for Heritage Route Selection (TFT-HRS) algorithm ranks the candidate heritage routes. Finally, after each virtual tour, the user preferences metadata are updated in order in order the scheme to continuously learn about the user preferences.

Lessons learned from a project examining the learning outcomes and experiences in 360o videos

“…Research on the educational uses of 360 o videos, while not yet adequately systemized, seems to cover a rather wide and diverse set of learning domains and sciences. They are commonly used for delivering virtual tours to places of interest, museums, and archaeological sites (e.g., Argyriou et al, 2020;Skondras et al, 2019), as well as for presenting experiments and medical procedures (e.g., Ardisara & Fung, 2019;Sankaran et al, 2019). They have been also used for the teaching of subjects related to Ecology (e.g., Fokides & Kefalinou, 2020;Ritter et al, 2019), Physics (Wu et al, 2019), Physical Education (Kittel et al, 2020;Paraskevaidis & Fokides, 2020), Religion Education (Johnson, 2018), language learning (Berns et al, 2018;Xie et al, 2019), Public Health Education (Dawson et al, 2019), Safety Education (Pham et al, 2018), and for delivering virtual courses (Lee et al, 2017).…”

Enabling cultural heritage spaces in Nigerian public libraries: A case study of the Anambra State Library Board

“…In view of this, some of the cultural heritage information activities in libraries have involved virtual tours using drones to pique interest. Skondras et al (2019) report that drones equipped with 360-degree cameras performed real-time video streaming of cultural sites. These activities are planned to touch lives and relate with indigenous peoples' memories of their origins.…”