Interactive 360° virtual reality campus tour with spatial navigation and speech recognition for enhanced user immersion

Campus visits are a valuable way for prospective students, newly enrolled students and visitors to learn about a university's facilities, services and learning environment. However, physical visits to the campus are not always possible due to geographical distance, time constraints, financial costs, or accessibility limitations. Current virtual campus tours are limited to interaction and cannot recreate the on-campus experience. To overcome these challenges, this project created an Interactive 360° Virtual Reality Campus Tour with Spatial Navigation and Speech Recognition for Enhanced User Immersion for a local university. The proposed system integrates 360° panoramic images, gaze-based spatial navigation, and speech recognition to provide an interactive, hands-free, and immersive virtual campus exploration experience. The system was developed using the Agile Software Development methodology with Unity 6, Meta XR SDK, and the Meta Quest 3 headset to support interaction and navigation within the virtual environment. The developed system was evaluated with 40 respondents who were allowed to navigate and interact with the virtual campus as they wished with the given navigation and interaction features. After the evaluation the respondents evaluated the system by answering a 5 point Likert scale questionnaire on ease of use, navigation, usability and interaction, usefulness, immersion, user satisfaction and behavioural intention. The Cronbach's Alpha coefficient for the questionnaire was 0.972, which is considered excellent reliability. The evaluation results indicated that the perceptions of the respondents with the system were positive, especially in terms of intuitive navigation, responsive speech interaction, immersive virtual environment, and overall usability. The findings also indicated high levels of user satisfaction and behavioural intention to continue using and recommend the application. The project's main contribution is the integration of 360° panoramic virtual reality, gaze-based navigation, and speech recognition to provide a more engaging and accessible alternative to conventional virtual campus tours. Overall, the developed system has proved that immersive virtual reality technologies can be used for the promotion of campus, increase of visitor interaction, and creating a new virtual platform for remote orientation for higher education institutions.