Kairos: Exploring a Virtual Botanical Garden through Point Clouds

This paper reports the design, implementation and evaluation of a point cloud-based virtual reality environment for a botanical garden. The objective of this work was the creation of a point cloud-based digital timestamp of the Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra, capturing reality and thus a moment in time that can be run and visualised in 3D space in real-time. This environment consists of three distinct locations within the Garden, containing century-old tree specimens. These areas were digitised through photogrammetry to create point clouds, which were then used as the basis of an immersive audiovisual experience whose main goal was to convey the ambiance of the Garden, along with showing people its natural processes, usually hidden to the naked eye, with the aim of rekindling our relationship with nature. We produced multimedia content consisting of PC- and VR-based experiences and 360° videos. Both PC and VR variants were evaluated by 22 volunteers where we assessed the user experience, the resulting ambiance and the gameplay. The results show a positive response from users, which described the resulting experience as “Peaceful”, “Calming”, “Relaxing”, “Dreamy”, “Colourful”, “Immersive” and “Nice”.