Exploring 3D Virtual Environments through Optimised Spherical Panorama Navigation

Commonly, immersive and virtual reality systems simulate real environments exploiting 3D computer graphics. This entails a considerable work to be done in models development and objects textures mapping in order to obtain a good degree of realism. Furthermore, the excessive complexity and the high rendering quality of the models can compromise system performance, especially in a web environment. This paper describes a vision based approach which allows a user to immersively navigate a real cultural environment through a lightweight web based system for the interactive walk-through and browsing of an ordered sequence of spherical panoramas