Development of a Framework for Web-Based Collaborative VR Tours Using 360VR Images/Videos

This paper proposes a new framework for web-based VR tours using 360VR images/videos extended to enable network collaborations. In our previous work, we developed a framework for web-based VR tours and we extended the framework to support audio/video communication and collaborative operations. For the development of web-based collaborative VR contents, there are several frameworks such as networked-aframe, threejs-webrtc and so on. Networked-aframe is very popular because it provides various DOM elements those are easy for even novice developers to create web-based collaborative VR contents. However, networked-aframe does not provide network collaboration functions as simple JavaScript programs. Therefore, the authors employed threejs-webrtc instead of networked-aframe for the network collaborations of their frameworks because the authors’ frameworks are constructed natively JavaScript programs and they are easy to employ networked collaboration functions provided as basic JavaScript programs like threejs-webrtc. This paper explains how threejs-webrtc was employed within the already developed frameworks of the authors and shows several web-based collaborative VR tours of 360VR images/videos.