Virtual tourism could get more realistic: Model builds panoramas

Virtual tourism could get more realistic: Model builds panoramas Gaby Clark Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Chief Editor Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model to generate realistic panoramic images for virtual tourism. The work has potential applications in cultural heritage preservation and destination marketing, the team suggests. Details are reported in the International Journal of Information Quality. The new model, known as SGMSD-Net, addresses a problem with AI-generated tourism imagery in that pictures may look convincing but fail to replicate accurately the actual scene being depicted. The new model uses semantic guidance, which helps interpret a scene's meaning. It also applies diffusion modeling to generate images through progressive refinement. The team explains that three resolution stages are used to produce the overall structure of the image before adding textures and lighting details. Tests on two data sets, SUN360 and Matterport3D, found that SGMSD-Net outperformed four existing approaches in terms of image quality, perceptual similarity and alignment with the descriptions. Subjective evaluation also showed the generated scenes to have clarity and consistency. The work could be used to support virtual tours that allow visitors to explore destinations before traveling. Additionally, the model might be used in educational reconstructions of historical sites that are either difficult to access or need protection from tourism for the sake of conservation. Future research will explore combining the model with three-dimensional reconstruction and multimodal AI systems. These will process different types of information to create a more interactive representation of the virtual destination. More information Lun Wei et al., Semantic-guided multi-scale diffusion network for immersive tourism content generation, International Journal of Information Quality (2026). DOI: 10.1504/ijiq.2026.157237 Provided by Inderscience