Virtual Tourism with Drones: Experiments and Lag Compensation

Abstract

Tourism always involves physical movement between places, an activity that may be cumbersome, expensive, or even dangerous. Virtual tourism aims at reducing limitations by recreating real touristic venues in computers as 3D models. However, virtual tourism is always premade or prerecorded. In our virtual tourism approach we use UAVs to fly around at the target venues, and send a video they record live to a tourist sitting at home, or walking in a treadmill. The video is presented in a VR visor, and head movements steer the orientation of the drone. This way tourists have the impression to really visit a remote site live, without any limitations. We present experimental results and analyze the overhead of compensating Internet network delay.