Immersive Trip Reports

Since the advent of consumer photography, tourists and hikers have made photo records of their trips to share later. Aside from being kept as memories, photo presentations such as slideshows are also shown to others who have not visited the location to try to convey the experience.However, a slideshow alone is limited in conveying the broader spatial context, and thus the feeling of presence in beautiful natural scenery is lost. We address this by presenting the photographs as part of an immersive experience. We introduce an automated pipeline for aligning photographs with a digital terrain model. From this geographic registration, we produce immersive presentations which are viewed either passively as a video, or interactively in virtual reality. Our experimental evaluation verifies that this new mode of presentation successfully conveys the spatial context of the scene and is enjoyable to users.