Virtual reality 360 UTM campus tour with voice commands

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is the way for the human to interact with their dream world through computer technology by simulating the experience of a realistic world. This paper presents the development of Virtual Reality 360 Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Campus Tour with voice commands using the Head Mounted Display (HMD) as the medium to experience the simulated artificial world. This technology was designed for smartphone users to maximize the lower cost budget VR and affordable by everyone. Besides, the application was developed by using Unity3D, VR software development kit (SDK), and IBM Watson Speech Platform application programming interface (API). The VR application presents some of the interesting places and schools of UTM as the main attraction in VR world with the 360-degree view. The existing problem is that some of the students and visitors are not familiar with the school and the places around UTM. Hence, this project was developed to assist them to understand UTM better and promote the beauty of this university. This paper discussed the progress of the VR technology for campus tour from the basic overview, the methodology until the user testing stage. The result was the complete prototype of a virtual reality 360 campus tour which can promote UTM Skudai as one of the beautiful campuses to visit.