Building and Evaluating a Realistic Virtual World for Large Scale Urban Exploration from 360° Videos

Abstract: We propose to build realistic virtual worlds, called 360RVW, for large urban environments directly from 360{\deg} videos. We provide an interface for interactive exploration, where users can freely navigate via their own avatars. 360{\deg} videos record the entire environment of the shooting location simultaneously leading to highly realistic and immersive representations. Our system uses 360{\deg} videos recorded along streets and builds a 360RVW through four main operations: video segmentation by intersection detection, video completion to remove the videographer, semantic segmentation for virtual collision detection with the avatar, and projection onto a distorted sphere that moves along the camera trajectory following the avatar's movements. Our interface allows users to explore large urban environments by changing their walking direction at intersections or choosing a new location by clicking on a map. Even without a 3D model, the users can experience collision with buildings using metadata produced by semantic segmentation. Furthermore, we stream the 360{\deg} videos so users can directly access 360RVW via their web browser. We fully evaluate our system, including a perceptual experiment comparing our approach to previous exploratory interfaces. The results confirm the quality of our system, especially regarding the presence of users and the interactive exploration, making it most suitable for a virtual tour of urban environments.