JOIV : Int. J. Inform. Visualization, 5(4) - December 2021 354-359

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
ON INFORMATICS VISUALIZATION

INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL ON
INFORMATICS
VISUALIZATION

journal homepage : www.joiv.org/index.php/joiv

Virtual Campus Tour Application through Markerless Augmented
Reality Approach
Ang Wei Liang a, Noorhaniza Wahid a,*, Taufik Gusman b
a

Media & Signal Processing Focus Group, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology,
Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Malaysia, Parit Raja, 86400 Johor, Malaysia
b
Department of Information Technology, Politeknik Negeri Padang, West Sumatera, Indonesia
Corresponding author: *nhaniza@uthm.edu.my

Abstract—Augmented Reality (AR) technology has been widely used on campus tours by universities all around the world. However,
the students that stay very far away do not have a chance to visit around the campus. Also, the information that is available on the
official website is static, resulting in the visitors feeling less engaged with the information. Hence, the virtual campus tour application
using the markerless AR technology, namely AR-UTHM Tour is proposed to be developed on the Android mobile-based platform to
visualize the buildings and facilities that are available in the university, specifically Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM).
This approach allows the users to visualize the 3D models by pointing the camera at any flat surface. Then, the feature point will be
generated to generate a virtual plane. The information about the facilities was obtained from the UTHM official website and the 3D
models of the buildings were referred to the floor plan and the actual images. The user acceptance test has been conducted on 30
students of UTHM using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The result shows that more than 50% of the respondents have
successfully executed the AR session without any error. Overall results show that the users are satisfied with the AR-UTHM Tour
application. In conclusion, this application is suitable to be used as a medium to introduce and promote UTHM virtually. Future
improvements in terms of detailing the aesthetic of the 3D model will be taken into consideration.
Keywords— Virtual campus tour; markerless augmented reality; UTHM; virtual plane.
Manuscript received 8 Feb. 2021; revised 21 Apr. 2021; accepted 29 Oct. 2021. Date of publication 31 Dec. 2021.
International Journal on Informatics Visualization is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

reference to display the digital picture when the camera is
pointed at the marker. Therefore, marker-based AR relies on
image recognition algorithms, which are assisted by the
camera and the markers [5]. Meanwhile, markerless AR [6]
uses positional information received from mobile devices’
accelerometer, digital compass, and Global Positioning
System (GPS) to identify the position of the device pointed to
in the actual world by assigning the virtual objects’ longitude
and latitude [7].
AR technology has been widely employed in a variety of
industries in recent years, including retail [8], construction
[9], healthcare [10], education [11], entertainment [12],
edutainment [13], and edu-tourism [14][15]. Moreover, an
edu-tourism such as virtual campus tour is one of the studies
involved with the tourism sector in the university which can
be implemented by using AR technology. In the tourism
sector, tourists may improve their tour experience by using

I. INTRODUCTION
In this era of technological advancement, Augmented
Reality (AR) has become one of the greatest technology
trends in this world. AR is a technology that combines actual
items with virtual information in a real-world setting. AR is a
system that meets three essential requirements which are the
mixing of real and virtual things in a real environment, realtime interaction, and precise 3D registration of virtual and real
items [1]. AR enables the virtual object to harmonize with the
actual environment. With AR capability, users capable of
seeing the virtual object are in the real environment thus it
enriches the interface of the system [2]. AR uses computer
graphics technology to overlay virtual information in realworld situations in real-time [3]. AR systems can be divided
into marker-based AR and markerless AR. Marker-based AR
[4] necessitates the use of a visible static marker as a spatial

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AR technology. With the aid of AR, tourists may obtain
information in real-time while touring a place.
In Malaysia, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia
(UTHM) is a well-known Malaysian Technical University
Network (MTUN) that offers a variety of courses to students.
UTHM additionally provides facilities for students to perform
their tasks in their learning process. With the huge campus
area, it is difficult to explore every single area of the campus
in a single day trip. A campus tour usually will be organized
to help the new students to know about the facilities and
environment on the campus. However, the students have to be
physically present in the campus vicinity. Recently, the
pandemic of Covid-19 caused the education sector to close.
Thus, they are not allowed to enter university and are not able
to visit around the campus physically. To address this
problem, a markerless mobile AR application namely ARUTHM Tour is developed. This application allows users to
explore the campus and know about the courses and facilities
provided by the university.
Currently, there are several campus touring systems that
use AR technology that has been developed and published
such as iMAP-CampUS [16], Mobile Campus Touring
System for Beijing Normal University [17], and NUS AR
Map [18]. These existing applications are reviewed based on
the features and the drawbacks of the system. The comparison
between these three existing applications and the proposed
application in terms of different features such as AR-type, 3D
model
visualization,
individual
campus
building
visualization, and applications presentation is presented in
Table 1.

These existing campus touring systems utilize AR
technology to help the freshman by improving their campus
navigation experiences in the campus. These applications also
can help the users determine their places of interest and
navigate to the places. However, some limitations exist in the
existing applications where they do not provide 3D
visualization. Also, these applications could not visualize
individual campus buildings and require the students to
present physically in campus vicinity to use the application.
Thus, the proposed AR-UTHM Tour application is developed
to overcome those limitations by applying simple markerless
AR. With this markerless AR, the users could visualize the
3D buildings on a virtual plane in the AR session by pointing
the camera on any flat surface. Thus, they do not require to be
presented physically in the campus vicinity.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: material and
method describe the design and development process,
followed by the results and discussion section from the user
acceptance test. Finally, the last section concludes the work
and highlights the possible future improvement on the
application.
II. MATERIAL AND METHOD
AR-UTHM Tour application is developed using the Agile
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) model [19]. This
methodology is the most suitable methodology to use in
developing this project because it focuses on process
adaptability and the requirements of the target users by rapid
delivery of an operational product.

TABLE I
COMPARISON BETWEEN T HE EXISTING APPLICATIONS AND DEVELOPED
APPLICATION

Features

AR-type

iMAPCamp
US

Marker
less AR

Mobile
Campus
Touring
System for
Beijing
Normal
University
Marker
less AR

NUS
AR
MAP

Requirement
Analysis

ARUTHM
TOUR

Design

Develop

Deployment

Review

Fig. 1 Adapted from Agile Software Development Model [19]

Markerbased
AR

Fig. 1 shows the adapted Agile SDLC [19] phases that
consist of requirement analysis, design, develop, testing,
deployment, and review. Each phase is discussed in the
following topic with a detailed explanation.

Marker
less AR
Visualize a
3D
building
on a virtual
plane

3D model
visualization

Do not provide 3D visualization

Individual
campus
building
visualization

Unable to visualize individual
campus building

Visualize
the
individual
campus
building in
AR

Application
presentation

Users present physically in the
campus vicinity

Does not
require to
be
physically
in the
campus
vicinity

A. Requirement Analysis
In this phase, user requirements were collected by
performing a user analysis. This analysis could help the
developer to gather the target user’s behaviour and their
requirements
toward
the
proposed
application.
Questionnaires were distributed to 30 students of UTHM, and
their responses from the questionnaires were considered in the
development of AR-UTHM Tour application. The results
showed that more than 50% of the respondents agreed that AR
campus tour applications could provide dynamic information
and an immersive experience while exploring the campus
virtually.
B. Design
The activities performed in this phase are designing the
overall system and the objects. The application was designed
based on the overall system design as shown in Fig. 2. The
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flowchart and storyboards were drawn in this phase. The
overall system design was divided into two parts: campus
overview and individual building view. Campus overview
shows the location of the building in UTHM together with its
history and description while individual building view
provides the information about facilities and AR view
experience on the faculty buildings.

Fig. 4 Modeling the building and assigning texture and material to the model

D. Deployment
To enable the markerless AR function in the application,
Wikitude Augmented Reality Software Development Kit
(Wikitude AR SDK) [22] was implemented into the
application. With the aid of Wikitude AR SDK, the phone
does not require very high specification and the support of the
Google ARCore as well as the Google Play Services for AR.
Fig. 5 shows the flow of generating a virtual plane on
markerless AR to display the 3D model.
Fig. 2 Overall system design

Fig. 3 Outline the shape of the building
from the floor plan

Meanwhile, the objects’ design involved creating the
interface and interaction buttons. These objects were designed
using Adobe Photoshop 2021 and saved in Portable Network
Graphics (.png) file format. To enhance and ease the user
navigation experience, the buttons were designed based on the
principle of affordances and consistency [20], which is simple
and clear.

Display AR
view
Point the
camera at any
flat surface

Touch anywhere on
the virtual plane
Generate feature
point to generate
virtual plane

Display
3D
output

Fig. 5 Generate virtual plane on markerless AR

To enable the markerless AR view session, the Wikitude
Camera Script was attached to the game object of Wikitude
Camera as depicted in Fig. 6. The camera frame rate was set
to 30 frames per second for better display. The Wikitude
License Key can be requested from the Wikitude official
website. Meanwhile, Android SDK, JDK, NDK, and Gradle
must be downloaded and installed before building the project
and publishing the application into Android Application
Package (.apk) file.

C. Develop
Develop phase includes the model object and integration in
Unity software with scripting to allow the interaction and
functionality of the application. The model object explains the
modeling process, the building of 3D models, and assigning
the texture and material to the 3D models using Blender
software. The integration in Unity involved scripting and the
implementation of markerless AR functions. In this paper, the
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology
(FSKTM) building was chosen to be modeled and displayed
in the AR session. The building objects were modeled based
on the actual floor plan [21] as well as the actual images of
the building. All objects were modeled separately. The floor
plan was imported into Blender to build up the actual image
as shown in Fig. 3.
Then, the shape of the building was outlined and produced
a wireframe. Next, the aesthetic value was added to the 3D
models with texture and material as shown in Fig. 4. All the
models and assets were integrated into Unity with scripting.
The scripting of the objects and system function was written
in the C# programming language. The features such as show
and hide the panel, load scene function, exit function, and
implementation of markerless AR session were created to
help AR-UTHM Tour application functioning.

Fig. 6 Wikitude Camera Script

Then, Unity will build up all the scenes based on the build
settings once the build button is pressed. The functionality of
the built application is tested on an Android mobile phone, as
shown in Fig. 7.

356

memory capacity of 505 MB. To evaluate the usability of the
application, the .apk file was released to 30 students of UTHM
via Google Drive together with the questionnaire in Google
Form. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) [23] was
adopted to measure user acceptance towards the application
based on four constructs and three evaluation variables
[24][25] as tabulated in Table 2. Each construct consists of
three questions where these questions were designed based on
the evaluation variables.
Based on the respondents’ profiles, 73.3% of the
respondents know about AR technology, while 56.7% are
very familiar with the AR application and used to it. Thus, the
knowledge of AR and the experience might affect the results
of the testing on the AR-UTHM Tour application.

Fig. 7 AR view of FSKTM building

TABLE II
TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE MODEL FOR EVALUATING APPLICATION
QUALITY

Construct
Perceived of
usefulness (PU)

Evaluation
variables
Information

Measured item
PU1: I found that the
information
about
facilities is complete.
PU2: I found that the 3D
building model of the
Faculty of Computer
Science and Information
Technology (FSKTM) is
similar to the actual
building.
PU3: I found that the
information can make me
understand more about
the facilities.

Perceived ease
of use (PEOU)

Usability

PEOU1: The button is
simple and easy to
understand.
PEOU2: The navigation
through the application is
clear and simple.
PEOU3: The application
is easy to use.

User satisfaction
(US)

Overall
performance

US1: The buttons are
compatible with their
respective function.
US2: I was completely
satisfied when using the
AR
session.
US3: I found it is easy to
get the information about
facilities
from
the
application.

Attribute of
usability (AU)

Functionality

Fig. 8 Analysis of Perceived of Usefulness (PU) on Information

In terms of PU on Information, Fig. 8 shows that 56.7% of
respondents strongly agreed and 33.3 % agreed that the
information about facilities is complete. Besides, 30.0% of the
respondents strongly agreed and 40.0% agreed that the 3D
model of FSKTM is similar to the actual building.
Conversely, only 3.3% of the respondents feel the 3D model
is not similar to the actual building. Thus, some improvement
in detailing the presentation of the 3D model will be taken into
account. Furthermore, 40.0% of the respondents strongly
agreed while 46.7% agreed that the information provided in
the application could help them more understand the facilities.

Fig. 9 Analysis of Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) on Usability

AU1: The AR session is
stable.
AU2: The building can be
placed on a virtual plane.
AU3: The integration of
assets such as buttons and
3D building models are
implemented well.

Meanwhile, Fig. 9 shows the results of PEOU to determine
the usability of the application. 50.0% of the respondents
strongly agreed and 43.4% of the respondents agreed that the
buttons are simple and easy to understand. Besides that,
43.3% of the respondents strongly agreed and 40.0% of the
respondents agreed that the navigation through the application
is clear and simple. Moreover, 36.7% of the respondents
strongly agreed and 46.7% of the respondents agreed that the
application is easy to use. Instead, only 3.3% of the
respondents feel some difficulties due to the unfamiliarity

III. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
AR-UTHM Tour application has been successfully
developed with a resolution of 2240 x 1080 pixels and a
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IV. CONCLUSION

with the AR application. Based on the overall results, it can
be said that the usability of the application is acceptable.
In order to obtain user satisfaction towards the overall
performance of the application, Fig. 10 reveals that 50% of
the respondents strongly agreed and 43.3% of the respondents
agreed that the buttons are compatible with their respective
functions. Also, 26.7% of the respondents strongly agreed and
33.3% of the respondents agreed with the satisfaction of the
AR session. This shows that more than 50% of the
respondents successfully executed the AR session.
Conversely, only 10.0% of the respondents are not satisfied
with the AR session due to unfamiliarity with the system and
difficulties while scanning and maintaining the virtual plane.
Meanwhile, 36.7% of the respondents strongly agreed and
60.0% of the respondents agreed that they could get
information about facilities easily from the application.
According to the overall results of this construct, it can be said
that most of the respondents are satisfied with the overall
performance of the application.

In conclusion, the AR-UTHM Tour application has been
developed successfully and has the potential to increase the
interest of the visitors and new students to enroll in UTHM
with a more interactive and immersive experience.
Furthermore, the AR-UTHM Tour application is suitable for
users that are staying far away from the UTHM or the new
students that want to enroll in UTHM. The application is
provided with a simple markerless AR implementation that
allows users to access UTHM information without having to
be there physically. Although the form of visualization cannot
provide a full touring experience as realistic as an actual visit,
it could help the visitor’s desire to visit from a distant
destination by implementing markerless AR. Some future
improvements can be implemented in the future to improve
the AR-UTHM Tour application and address its existing
limitations. One of the future improvements could be made to
include more 3D building models to be displayed in the AR
session. Besides, more interaction can be added in the AR
session to increase interactivity. Lastly, the application could
include more information about facilities that are available in
the university.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to thank the Faculty of Computer Science
and Information Technology, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn
Malaysia for its support and encouragement throughout the
process of conducting this study.

Fig. 10 Analysis of User Satisfaction (US) on Overall Performance

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