Use of 3D technology in underground tourism: example of Rzeszow (Poland) and Lviv (Ukraine)

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, human mobility has been limited all over the world. People started to take advantage of computer technology to compensate for the lack of possibility of leaving their homes. Virtual travel, which can be conducted in many different ways, has become one of the ways of using this technology. Therefore, analyses have been carried out to investigate the possibility of applying 3D technology to promote underground tourist attractions. The Underground Tourist Route in Rzeszow (Poland) and the underground of the Old City Hall in Lviv (Ukraine) were selected as the research objects. They were inventoried with the terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) method and with the application of the Faro Focus 3D laser scanner. Then films demonstrating virtual tour around the inventoried objects were created based on the clouds of points obtained during the measurements. As a part of the research, it was verified whether these methods could encourage people to visit the researched objects more than their standard advertisements presented on the Internet. The evaluation was performed with the use of a semantic differentiation test. The survey research carried out for this purpose was implemented using the CAWI technique. The questionnaires were available for the respondents from the last week of April 2020 to the first week of July 2020. The size of the researched group accounted for 393 people. The respondents came from 23 countries on 5 continents. The obtained results confirm that the use of 3D technology in the promotion of tourist attractions may be a good decision.