Three-Dimensional Virtual Tourism

3DVT (or 3D virtual tourism) refers to the street-level navigation of virtual reality environments for purposes of exploring physical places in space and time without physically traveling there. 3DVT invokes a virtual tour that employs usage of 3D models in addition to 2D panoramic images, a sequence of hyperlinked still or video images, and/or image-based models of the real location and multimedia support elements such as sound effects, music, narration, and text. As opposed to actual tourism, 3DVT is accessed on a personal computer (typically over the Internet). It does not require travel, but ideally, 3DVT viewing evokes an experience of moving through the represented 3D space.

Virtual tours can be especially useful for universities and in the real estate industry, looking to attract prospective students and tenants/buyers, respectively, eliminating for the consumer the cost of travel to numerous individual locations. For these kind of applications, typically involving on-line maps, 3DVT can be designed and constructed from 3D interactive mapping technologies, such as Google Earth or Virtual Earth or X3D Earth.