A study compared a YouTube walkthrough with a WebVR tour of the same faculty building.
Universities struggle to reach prospective students who live far away. Videos help, but a video only shows what its creator chose to film. If a student wants to see the laboratory benches or the walk from the gate to the lecture hall, a fixed edit rarely answers the question.
A study from Universitas Brawijaya put two media head to head for exactly this job: a two dimensional YouTube video and a 360 degree WebVR tour, both describing the Faculty of Public Health at Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya.
The video team shot with digital cameras and edited in Wondershare Filmora, mixing panoramic, tracking and aerial shots with a presenter walking viewers through each spot. The WebVR version used a dual lens camera to capture photo spheres, then stitched them into seamless panoramas in PTGui. Both covered four areas of the faculty, with two to five spots in each.
Respondents were smartphone users aged 18 to 35 who had never visited the campus but were interested in studying in Surabaya. The comparison ran in Google Chrome.
The WebVR tour gave users more control over what they looked at, and that control translated into access to more detailed information. A video viewer follows the camera. A WebVR viewer decides where to look, and keeps looking until the question is answered.
The authors frame this as the core difference between the two media. Video is efficient at delivering a scripted message. WebVR is better at answering questions the script did not anticipate, because the viewer sets the order.
The finding is qualitative: more control over what is seen, and more detail available to the viewer. It is also tied to a single campus tour. A WebVR build costs more to produce, since photo spheres need stitching, and the result depends on a browser that renders them smoothly.
Pratama et al. (2023). Improving Information Delivery Effectiveness and Efficiency Using WebVR Technology. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Sustainable Information Engineering and Technology, 657-663.
