Design of Immersive Virtual Tour Application Based on Geospatial Analysis

The tourism sector has a strategic role in promoting national economic development. As a largest archipelagic country in the world with more than 17,000 islands, Indonesia has a great tourism industry potential. Unfortunately, the wealth of tourism is still not utilized optimally. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF) survey through the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2017, Indonesia's tourism competitiveness index is ranked 42 out of 136 countries. This condition is far in comparison to the neighboring countries in ASEAN, whereas Indonesia has much greater tourism resources. This paper proposes the development of an immersive panoramic 360° virtual tour application by employing the image matching method. This web-based application also integrates with the Google Map API to provide adaptive geographic mapping support. The test results show that the application can run well and error free.