Virtual Reality of Historical Places in North Sulawesi

Sulawesi Utara adalah salah satu provinsi di Indonesia yang memiliki banyak tempat menarik untuk dikunjungi, seperti wisata alam, kuliner dan tempat-tempat bersejarah. Presentasi informasi yang mudah dan menarik sangat penting untuk atraksi wisata di SulawesiUtara. Penyajian informasi yang menarik dapat menarik minat wisatawan mancanegara maupun lokal untuk berkungjung di Sulawesi Utara. Virtual Reality menjadi salah satu teknologi yang dapat memberikan pengalaman baru dalam melakukan eksplorasi suatu tempatsecara digital dengan sangat atraktif. Oleh karena itu, tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah mengembangkan sebuah aplikasi yang dapat memberikan informasi tentang tujuh tempat bersejarah di Sulawesi Utara dengan menggunakan teknologi virtual reality, terutama teknikfotografi yang merupakan teknik untuk menampilkan gambar dengan sudut pandang 360 derajat. Aplikasi ini dirancang menggunakan metode Prototyping sebagai model proses. Unity 3D digunakan dalam penelitian ini untuk membangun aplikasi dan antarmuka dan memungkinkan untuk dapat di jalankan di berbagai operating system. Aplikasi ini dibuat menggunakan bahasa pemrograman C #. Dalam penelitian ini dibahas mulai dari proses desain, pengambilan gambar dengan teknik Immersive, hingga menghasilkan aplikasi yang siap digunakan.


INTRODUCTION
North Sulawesi is one of Indonesian provinces which is located at the northern part of Sulawesi and the capital is Manado [1]. There are lots of interesting places to visit in North Sulawesi, such as nature tourism, culinary, and historical places. This research is more focused on historical places in North Sulawesi. According to the observation done by the researchers, the researchers found that the information provided about the historical places in North Sulawesi took the form of social media or a website which is considered less attractive.
In accordance with the current technology, an easy and interesting information presentation is necessary for tourism attraction especially the historical place in North Sulawesi. Therefore, the researchers are developing an application that can provide information about historical place in North Sulawesi by using Virtual Reality technology.
Virtual reality is a development technology in field of Computer Graphics (CG) which is user can interact with virtual world [2] [3]. The advantages of virtual reality is to make user to feel the virtual world as real as they can by using the fivesense such as eyes and ears. Now google and any other developers already launch the tools to utilizing the virtual reality, such as Google Cardboard, and VRBox as shown in   Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that is created to support the interaction between user and the three dimensional environment that is simulated by a computer to make a real object or imagination, so that the user can pretend to be involved at the virtual world [5]. There are four elements in VR such as virtual world, sensory feedback, interactivity, and immersion [6]. In immersion element, there are another types of immersion [7], such as Non-Immersive VR (Desktop Virtual Reality). This type of immersion can be implemented by using personal computer or laptop. The second type of immersion is Semi-Immersive wide screen projection system, a technique that use wide screen monitor to experience the virtual reality. The last type is Fullly Immersive Head-Mounted Display System.
In this research, we use the advantages of virtual reality technique especially immersive photography to be used as a promotion media about the historical places in North Sulawesi to be used as a promotion media for historical places in North Sulawesi. The advantages of using immersive photography is that the user can see the picture of an object in all 360 degrees' angle.
The object is created using panorama 360 software, where the pictures are obtained from combining pictures of historical place. This research is implemented by using fully immersive head-mounted system technique which is a technique to benefit the sensation of Virtual Reality world.

Framework
In this section, we present our framework of application that explains how to create the interaction of the user with the application.  Still in Historic Place menu, this application also provided change position features for each historical places, so in each historical places user can see more than 1 point of view. About menu to show the information of application developers, and for Help menu will explain how to use application. After that, the third step is the system will return the interface of the main menu application, and lastly to use this application is needed to wear head mounted display, in this case use Google Cardboard. This method will make optimal the virtual world experience.

Analysis and Application Design
We analyzed and designed our application framework into two diagrams i.e., Use Case Diagram and Class Diagram. They will be explained below.
Use Case Diagram is a picture of interaction between application and the actor to define the functions of application. User can see the listed seven menu of historic place and choose the button to see the information of the historical place. Application shows the information of each historical places with image 360 degrees angle, text, and sound.

Get list of Historic Place
User can get the information of the selected historic place.

Get info
User can see the information of the selected historic place with image 360 degrees angle, text, and sound.

Image Info 360 degrees angle
Application shows the information of historical place with borderless image or image 360 degrees angle.

Text Info
Application shows the information of historical place with text information.

Virtual Reality of Historical…
 36 6. Sound info The information of selected historical place is delivered by sound.

About
Application shows the information of the application.

Help
Application shows the user guide about the application.

Menu Class
This class is a class to display the main menu-HistoricPlace, About and Help.

HistoricPlace Class
This class is a class that will be listed the seven historical places and to show the information of the selected HistoricPlace.

About Class
This class is a class to display information about the application.

Help Class
This class is a class to show the user guide of the application.

Info Class
This class contains the informations of the Historic Place such as text, image 360 degrees angle, and sound information.

User Interface Design
These are the images of how this application look like. In short the user interface of application.

RESUTS AND DISCUSSION
We were using Game Engine Unity3D as the tool to build and compile our program. It came out as an APK (Android Application Package) to install it on our smartphone [7]. The result we've done our testing that focused on Main Menu and Historic Place Menu testing.
Here's the explanation as follows.

CONCLUSION
Based on this research there are three points of conclusion. The first point is this application can run on Android devices that have gyroscope and accelerometer sensor with Android 4.4 (Kitkat) as the minimum requirement for Android version. We also concluded that this application is successfully obtained its main work which is to provide the information of seven historical places in North Sulawesi by using the advantage of virtual reality, particularly the immersive photography technique. So in other words, this application can show the information with image 360 degrees angle, text and sound. And for the last point, to gained the best result we should using head mounted display (HMD). We've tried to use VRBox, and the display of the information came out was good, we can control the application by touching the button that already been provided in VRBox.

SUGESTIONS
This application is only made for Android user, therefore it would be great if this application can be built in cross platform compatibility so that this application can run on Personal Computer, iOS and Android smartphone. Secondly, more historical places in North Sulawesi or even other Indonesia historical places can be added to the applications. Lastly, this applications needs a high requirements in hardware, esspesialy for the storage. Its better if the data storage of 360 pictures stores in cloud database, so the application can be smaller and only if the user wants to explore the other places then the user may download the other 360 pictures using the applications.