A virtual reality application for augmented panoramic mountain images

Virtual reality is a powerful interaction mechanism that holds the promise of engaging users, not only for entertainment, but also for social and environmental purposes. In this paper we present PeakLensVR, a virtual reality mobile application that enables users to capture panoramic mountain images with their mobile devices and later visualize such images, enriched with metadata about the peaks visible from the capture point, with a low-end VR device. The application exploits a multi-stage data processing pipeline, which comprises the following steps: (1) the acquisition of a sequence of frames with the mobile phone camera and their annotation with sensor readings captured during the shooting session; (2) the creation of a panoramic image from the acquired frames, with state-of-the art stitching algorithms; (3) the registration of the panoramic image to the mountain skyline in view, by comparing the image skyline with a virtual profile extracted from the NASA SRTM Digital Elevation Model of the Earth; (4) the enrichment of the registered panoramic image with markers and metadata (name, altitude, etc.) of the peaks in view, by querying the OpenStreetMap GIS.