Design of a VR-Based Campus Tour Platform with a User-Friendly Scene Asset Management System

Virtual reality tours have become a desire for many educational institutions due to the potential difficulties for students to attend in person, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having the ability for a student to explore the buildings and locations on a university campus is a crucial part of convincing them to enroll in classes. Many institutions have already installed tour applications that they have either designed themselves or contracted to a third party. However, they lack a convenient way for non-maintainers, such as faculty, to manage and personalize their classrooms and offices in a simple way. In this paper, we propose a platform to not only provide a full virtual experience of the campus but also feature a user-friendly content management system designed for staff and faculty to customize their assigned scenes. The tour uses the Unity3D engine, which communicates to a university server hosting a custom .NET API and SQL database to obtain information about the virtual rooms through a role-based access system to the faculty and staff. We believe this system for managing tour scenes will solve both time and expense for the tour development team and allow them to focus on implementing other features, rather than having to fulfill requests for editing locations in the tour. We expect this framework to function as a tour platform for other universities, as well as small businesses and communities. We seek to demonstrate the feasibility of this platform through our developed prototype application. Based on small sample testing, we have received overall positive responses and constructive critique that has played a role in improving the application moving forward.