Virtual Campus Tour Application through Markerless Augmented Reality Approach

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) technology has been widely used on campus tours by universities all around the world. However, the students that stay very far away do not have a chance to visit around the campus. Also, the information that is available on the official website is static, resulting in the visitors feeling less engaged with the information. Hence, the virtual campus tour application using the markerless AR technology, namely AR-UTHM Tour is proposed to be developed on the Android mobile-based platform to visualize the buildings and facilities that are available in the university, specifically Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM). This approach allows the users to visualize the 3D models by pointing the camera at any flat surface. Then, the feature point will be generated to generate a virtual plane. The information about the facilities was obtained from the UTHM official website and the 3D models of the buildings were referred to the floor plan and the actual images. The user acceptance test has been conducted on 30 students of UTHM using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The result shows that more than 50% of the respondents have successfully executed the AR session without any error. Overall results show that the users are satisfied with the AR-UTHM Tour application. In conclusion, this application is suitable to be used as a medium to introduce and promote UTHM virtually. Future improvements in terms of detailing the aesthetic of the 3D model will be taken into consideration.