A web-based virtual museum application

A virtual-tour allows users to explore places of cultural interest such as museums or archaeological sites. This makes exhibits available to a broader audience that might not be able to travel physically, or serves as an incentive to visit the real place. The widespread use of immersive environments is a desirable goal for cultural heritage, and there are already many websites offering increasingly sophisticated visualisations. We have created a virtual museum web-application composed of connected spherical panoramas by using affordable hardware and software. To preserve a perceptually accurate visualisation of the museum's collections, within the context in which they are presented, the main focus of our work is to create high quality spherical panoramas with realistic colour and tone reproduction. We achieve our goal to create a virtual tour by connecting spherical panoramas created using commonly available photo stitching software, combined with methods like geometric correction, high dynamic range imaging (HDR) and tonemapping where applicable.