Oculus Earth -A VR Application Utilizing Google Earth and HMD

Abstract

Recently, geographic data, such as panoramic street photos and terrain/building CG models, have been freely distributed and widely used in virtual tourism and route-previewing. Meanwhile, the performance and costs of head-mounted display (HMDs) have been largely improved, which motivated us to couple geographic data and HMDs. In this study, we developed a 3D virtual tourism application, “Oculus Earth”, utilizing the Oculus Rift and the Google Earth. We conducted evaluation experiments and obtained positive results from users.