DOI:10.1145/2945292.2945294

Extracted Abstract:

This paper presents an immersive geo-spatial social media system for virtual and augmented reality environments. With the rapid growth of photo-sharing social media sites such as Flickr, Pinter- est, and Instagram, geo-tagged photographs are now ubiquitous. However, the current systems for their navigation are unsatisfy- ingly one- or two-dimensional. In this paper, we present our pro- totype system, Social Street View, which renders the geo-tagged social media in its natural geo-spatial context provided by immer- sive maps, such as Google Street View. This paper presents new algorithms for fusing and laying out the social media in an aesthet- ically pleasing manner with geospatial renderings, validates them with respect to visual saliency metrics, suggests spatio-temporal filters, and presents a system architecture that is able to stream geo-tagged social media and render it across a range of display platforms spanning tablets, desktops, head-mounted displays, and large-area room-sized curved tiled displays. The paper concludes by exploring several potential use cases including immersive social storytelling, learning about culture and crowd-sourced tourism. Keywords:spatial-temporal virtual reality; social media; street view; geographical information systems; mixed reality; WebGL Concepts:•Computing methodologies→Virtual reality; •Information systems→Geographic information systems; ∗ emails:{ruofei, varshney}@cs.umd.edu Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for per- sonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstract- ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. c ©2016 Copyright 1