A 360° Video Virtual Reality Room Demonstration

The "third mission" of higher education institution demands them to closely engage with the general society and stakeholders in the economy. An established method to do so is giving demos of different laboratories at events like open house days. 360. Virtual Reality (VR) can be a valuable medium in such settings, especially when laboratories or exhibits in these rooms cannot easily be visited. A fundamental task in such VR applications is to highlight important elements in this room to guide the user's attention. The creation of these cues for highlighting in 360 degrees video VR is already a non-trivial task itself. It is even more challenging for laymen in the field of VR who want to introduce their laboratory. In this paper we propose a 360 degrees demo concept that allows presenters to virtually introduce rooms, like laboratories, to laymen in the field of VR, such as visitors of open house events at universities. We describe an implementation of our demo concept and give insights in the authoring work flow. A challenge that arises during the authoring of video-based VR demos is the mandatory interdisciplinary knowledge. Programming skills and specific knowledge in the field of 3D modeling is necessary as for common 3D model-based VR. But furthermore, the recording of videos and the integration of domain-specific knowledge and involvement actors in these videos is crucial for VR demos. In an in-the-wild user study we evaluate our demo concept and show that it is well-accepted by the targeted audience.