VR Park Tour

Posted on by apn4094

Team Name

VR The Ones

Timeline

Fall 2022 – Spring 2023

Students

  • Veena Venugopal
  • Payton Parrish
  • Amna Syed
  • Anthony Nguyen
  • Stephanie Nguyen

Sponsor

United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)

Abstract

VR Park Tour is an application that provides a virtual tour of the various park locations maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Users of this system will be able to either use the basic mode to have a static 360◦ view of a park or the advanced mode to have an interactive tour experience. The app will have two modes of usage available. The first one will be a basic mode (static tour) which would allow the user to experience a 360◦ view of the park location chosen. The second one will be an interactive mode where the system would provide the user with a virtual reality interactive experience by using additional gadgets like a VR headset, joy-cons, etc. This application will have its full functionality available with an active internet connection. Offline uses will be restricted to the basic mode. The app can be used at the USACE park locations and beyond.

Background

The US Army Corps of Engineers(USACE) needs a mobile application that allows users to experience virtual tours at their parks by utilizing Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) programming. They are currently using an Android app that was created in 2020. However, the features are extremely limited and thus do not fully satisfy the USACE’s criteria and standards. The virtual environment for the previous app was not able to function properly, which caused the project to be at a stalemate. The main objective of the US Army Corps of Engineers is to promote outdoor recreation and educate the public about their parks. Hence, the VR Park Tour application is the most suitable for this purpose as anyone would be able
to access and tour the parks anytime and anywhere.

Project Requirements

Our top priority requirements are as follows:

  1. Home Page – Navigate between the video selection page and the settings page.
  2. Video Selection Page – Navigate between interactive and static tours.
  3. Static Tour Mode – Vanilla mode of touring that allows users to look around the current park being toured in a 360 manner.
  4. Interaction Mode – Point and look feature to allow users to engage with the park being toured.
  5. Settings Page – Allows the user to adjust the current state of the application such as lighting, volume, etc.
  6. Cardboard Mode – Allows users to switch to cardboard mode to experience the tour through a cardboard headset.
  7. UI – Display information and tours to the user.
  8. Responsive – User should experience < 1 second response time
  9. Multimedia Insertion – Sponsor will have the ability to insert mp4-formatted park tour videos.
  10. Safety Requirements – The user should be seated and not moving while using the application.

System Overview

The system will consist of mainly two layers – the User Interface and the Back-end. The user interface is how the user will see/interact with the 360◦ virtual reality tours. The user will load up onto the main menu where information to redirect to different parts of the application will be displayed. The user interface will have buttons to redirect to the video selection page, interactive mode, and settings page. The user will be able to choose any 360◦ video park tour on the video selection page. The user will also have an option for an interactive mode where they can choose an interactive version of a 360◦ video park tour. The settings page will allow the user to change certain settings of the application.

The back-end layer will provide the functionality to the application. It takes the requests from the user interface so that the user will be able to interact with the application. When the user clicks a button to interact with the application the request will be sent to the back end and displayed back to the user via the front end. When a user selects a park to tour the back end will relay it back to the front end to display it to the user.

Results

Our design and application were able to reach the USACE’s original goal of having
VR functionalities and capabilities. We wanted to focus on static VR tours, and we
were able to accomplish that. However, implementing user interaction was difficult
because we were constrained to Google Cardboard headset.

A demo video of our application at work:

Future Work

For continued enhancement of the VR Park Tour application, the following plans are proposed:

  • Implementation of advanced mode with elements like an interactive-tour guide to provide an informed tour experience.
  • Pop-up trivia questions to help the user understand the flora and fauna of the park areas better.
  • Enable cloud-storage options for videos to provide access to more videos.
  • Addition of features to enable video downloads for offline viewing.
  • Addition of features to refresh the application when a device regains internet access.

Project Files

Project Charter (link)

System Requirements Specification (link)

Architectural Design Specification (link)

Detailed Design Specification (link)

Poster (link)

Source Code Files (link)

References

[1] FullDive VR. https://vr.fulldive.com/home. Accessed: 2022-09-24.

[2] RUSU Technologies. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Irusu.IrusuVRCinemaPro.
Accessed: 2022-09-24

[3] Sites in VR. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.ercangigi.sitesin3d. Accessed:
2022-09-24.

[4] Unity for VR. https://unity.com/unity/features/vr. Accessed: 2022-09-24.

[5] YoutubeVR. https://vr.youtube.com/. Accessed: 2022-09-24.
VR The Ones – Fall 2022 page 13 of 13

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