Aerial Virtual Reality: Remote Tourism with Drones

This paper proposes a portable system for group-based exploration of remote landscapes in real-time. The system incorporates a drone for video capturing, a Raspberry Pi for wireless communication, an Android server for streaming and control, and one or more Android clients for rendering the footage in mobile virtual reality headsets. The system has been evaluated from a technical perspective to investigate and optimise resource utilisation, as well as from a user perspective with participants to investigate usability. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of group-based, virtual tours of remote landscapes in real-time using affordable components.