Standards in Virtual Worlds Virtual Travel Use Case Metaverse1 Project

Nowadays, tourism has become a very important industry in the international economy. Information and communication technologies are in constant development; they progress worldwide and across sectors. Their applications in tourism and tourist resources is rapidly increasing, reaching new, innovative and sometimes amazing results in terms of effectiveness, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction. Exploring the interaction between technologies and tourism is difficult and challenging. Specifically, using virtual world technologies as a new means of information for potential tourists is a big challenge where the actual methods, goals and needs still need to be exactly identified. This paper aims at analyzing why and how virtual worlds can become an important platform for tourism-oriented areas to promote a destination in general, and their local heritage and tourist added-value services in particular. The document will also introduce the design of the first prototypes and the validation results of the four specific technologies tested at the Virtual Travel Use Case (Soundscape generation, Multilinguality, Video streaming and Path and Camera Planning). Finally, the contribution to the MPEG-V standard will also be detailed in the paper.