A Virtual Campus Kiosk

This paper presents an Internet-based kiosk displaying the campus of the University of Hong Kong in a virtual reality environment. The objective is to construct an online guided-tour system for the campus and provide visitor information. The virtual campus indeed can be accessible through any Java-enabled WWW browser with VRML capability in addition to the kiosks. An automatic way-finding mechanism has also been implemented to help visitors to look up places within the campus. We will discuss the design of the enviroment, the construction of the 3D campus model, the techniques used to achieve reasonable navigation performance even on low-end systems, and the algorithm of the way-finding mechanism. The algorithm is based on graph theory to compute the shortest paths between any two locations inside the campus with various intelligent constraints.