The effectiveness of HMD-based virtual environments through 3D camera for hotel room tour

Many of hotel customers obtain information from hotel websites to find the best alternative. One of the crucial information for the choice is spatial/visual information of hotel rooms. However, hotel website provides photographs only showing representative room features that may not be sufficient to give a full understanding of hotel room to customers. HMD-based 3D virtual environments (HVE) created by 3D camera could improve customers' experiences of hotel rooms by providing full virtual tours of hotel rooms. However, to the best of our knowledge, whether HVE can adequately provide similar customers' perception on spatial/visual information remains unproven as physical hotel rooms. The present study thus aims to verify how similar and reliable information on physical hotel room HVE provides to hotel customers in comparison with hotel website with 2D photograph and display-based 3D virtual environment. For this purpose, this study conducted a comparative experiment to investigate perception of three environments. As a result, the study found that HVE is more effective to provide spatial/visual information as similar as an actual hotel room. In addition, HVE increases customers' perceptions towards the reliability of information, the quality of hotel room and intention to book.