Exploring Immersive 3D Information Metaverse for Planning Sightseeing Tours

Abstract

Recently, considerable attention has been devoted to planning sightseeing-tours by using a large number of geotagged photographs and restaurant reviews in Social Media. We have developed such a sightseeing-tour planning system that 1) extracts hot photo-spots from a set of geotagged photographs with timestamps, 2) classifies and embeds them in a 3D information space on the basis of image similarity of photographs, 3) visualizes restaurant reviews in the 3D information space, and 4) provides an immersive interaction environment in which a user explores the 3D information space in order to find his/her favorite hot photo- spots and plans his/her own sightseeing tour. Using real data from "Flickr" and "Tabe-log", we examined the effectiveness of the sightseeing-tour planning system.