Virtual Heritage Monument Tour in VR

Heritage monuments are fragile, distant and often inaccessible: travel costs, crowds and conservation closures keep most students from ever studying them on site. Photographs flatten them and video locks the viewer to the cameraperson's path. A 360° virtual tour fixes both — the viewer looks wherever they want — but commercial capture services are expensive and closed. This project builds the open, student-scale version: a Raspberry Pi 360° capture rig (Pi, camera modules, tripod mount) that the buyer uses to photograph a monument as overlapping panoramas, plus a WebXR tour web app where those panoramas become explorable scenes. Hotspots mark carved pillars, inscriptions and courtyards with info cards; a narration track and timeline tell the monument's story; a quiz checks what the visitor learned. Because the whole pipeline — capture, stitch, tour — is built by the student, the report documents a genuine content-production workflow, and the viva can go deep on panoramic imaging and WebXR.

1. The buyer plans capture stations around the monument (courtyard, entrance, sanctum approach) and mounts the Pi rig on the tripod at each station.
2. The capture script rotates through the camera modules (or triggers the 360 camera), shooting overlapping frames with fixed exposure per station.
3. Frames are transferred to a PC and stitched into equirectangular panoramas with the documented open-source pipeline; the guide covers alignment failures and re-shoots.
4. Panoramas are dropped into the tour app's scenes folder; the buyer authors hotspots (position, title, text, image) in a simple data file per scene.
5. The WebXR viewer renders each panorama as an inside-out sphere; hotspots are positioned by yaw/pitch and open info cards on click or gaze.
6. Narration text and the timeline are authored alongside; the quiz pulls its questions from the same content file so everything stays consistent.
7. The finished tour is a static web app — hostable anywhere — viewable on desktop, phone-with-viewer, or a WebXR headset.

Tech stack:

• Raspberry Pi (any recent model) + camera module(s) or 360 camera + tripod mount
• Python capture script (timed/bracketed shooting, station logging)
• Open-source panorama stitching pipeline (documented step-by-step)
• WebXR / three.js-based 360° tour web app (single deployable app)
• Hotspot/narration/quiz content as editable data files
• Cardboard-style phone viewer compatible (no dedicated headset required)

• [360° capture rig] Raspberry Pi with dual camera modules (or a 360 camera) on a tripod mount; a capture script shoots bracketed, overlapping panoramas at each marked station.
• [Panorama stitching workflow] Documented open-source stitching pipeline turning each station's shots into one equirectangular panorama, with exposure blending notes.
• [WebXR tour viewer] Explorable 360° scenes with drag look-around on desktop and head-tracked view in a Cardboard-style phone viewer or WebXR headset.
• [Clickable hotspots] Info cards pinned to architectural features — pillars, inscriptions, doorways — with text and images the buyer authors per monument.
• [Narration track] Per-scene audio-style narration with text transcript; the buyer records or writes their own script from research.
• [Historical timeline] A scrollable timeline of the monument's construction phases and events, linked to the scenes they belong to.
• [Visitor quiz] A short quiz per tour (5 questions typical) with scoring, built from the hotspot content.
• [Tour builder guide] Step-by-step workflow: plan stations, capture, stitch, author hotspots, publish — reusable for any monument.

• Assembled 360° capture rig (Raspberry Pi, camera modules, tripod mount, power bank)
• Capture script and station-planning guide
• Panorama stitching workflow documentation (open-source tools, troubleshooting)
• Complete WebXR tour web app source (viewer, hotspots, narration, timeline, quiz)
• Sample demo tour with included panoramas
• Content-authoring guide (hotspot data format, narration scripting, quiz format)
• Project report PDF (background, panoramic imaging, WebXR design, buyer-run capture procedure)
• PPT presentation for final review
• Viva Q&A preparation document (equirectangular projection, WebXR, stitching, hotspot math)
• Setup guide (rig assembly, first capture, first tour build)

• Panorama quality depends on the camera used and the buyer's capture discipline — alignment failures from moving subjects or uneven exposure need re-shoots, and the guide is honest about this.
• The buyer must obtain permission before photographing a protected monument; many sites restrict tripods and commercial-style shooting, and the guide covers permissions explicitly.
• Stitching is a documented manual/semi-automatic workflow, not one-click software — it takes practice, and the report treats it as a skill the student learns.
• WebXR headset support depends on the browser and device; the Cardboard-style phone path and desktop drag-look always work as fallbacks.
• Narration, hotspot text and quiz content are authored by the buyer from their own research — the project ships the pipeline and sample content, not a finished monument encyclopedia.
• Very large panoramas are heavy to download; the guide covers resolution/quality trade-offs for web delivery.