Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Using Drones for Virtual Tourism
David Mirk and Helmut Hlavacs
University of Vienna, Research Group Entertainment Computing, Vienna, Austria
{david@mirk,helmut.hlavacs}@univie.ac.at
1
Introduction
Virtual reality offers tourism many useful possibilities to create or extend virtual ex-
periences that tourists may accept and use as partial alternatives for real visitation
[4,5]. Especially in some areas of tourism, e.g. marketing, entertainment or education
virtual reality will become more and more valuable. The vision of this work is to al-
low users of a client software application to receive real-time video images of differ-
ent places of the world and watch them locally. As a special feature, and unlike to
fixed stationary webcams, the user should be as free as possible to define where the
“Virtual Eye” resides and what it is looking at.
2
The Virtual Tourist Project
Our approach is to use a cheap off-the-shelf drone (a Parrot ARDrone 2.0 [6,8]) as a
flying camera, and be used in a live scenario by tourists to roam around remote areas
and ideally be immersed in the application such that the tourist has the impression of
really being there.
To fulfill the task as complete as possible, we decided to choose a development
pattern which divides the control application to be developed into three main compo-
nents. Firstly, the server application, which is responsible for the direct control of the
ARDrone, transmitting the calculated navigation vectors to the ARDrone. The second
main component defines the graphical user client (client application), which processes
and transmits the direct input to the ground station via TCP. Finally, the existing SDK
for this purpose must be modified and extended in order to allow the user to use a
wide a range of different control devices (e.g. “Oculus Rift”).
The ARDrone 2.0 is very susceptible to outer influences. Moderate wind gusts de-
viate the drones very quickly from their original course which leads to a behavior
where the electronics of the quadrocopter try to counteract this divergence with abrupt
control maneuvers. This makes it difficult to provide a stable (vibration-free) video
sequence to the user [1,2,3]. Furthermore, the rigid mounting of the video cameras
leads to an undesirable side effect: basics quadrocopters control their flight direction
by changing the speeds of their propellers and thus changes their attitude. At an acce-
leration to the front the drone tilts with the front camera toward the ground, on a flight
back into sequence then turned toward the sky. To avoid this effect a modification
with a steerable front camera on a ball joint would be necessary.
