An Approach to Maintaining Viewer Perspective in Interactive Virtual Tours

While virtual tours have been around for some time, the ability to get a true sense of the location has not been adequately developed. As part of a partnership between our department and the Vatican, we have created a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel using multiple locations and interactive menus to allow users to feel as though they are actually there. Not only does the virtual tour give users a true sense of the place, but also it offers information about the chapel as well as the biblical history of paintings on the wall. The innovative aspect of this tour is the degree of attention given to maintaining viewer perspective at all times, so that movement appears both smooth and intuitive. In this paper, we discuss the overall development process of this virtual tour, and focus on the perspective maintaining techniques that were devised and evaluated.