  In 1997, the very first tour guide robot RHINO was deployed in a museum in
Germany. With the ability to navigate autonomously through the environment, the
robot gave tours to over 2,000 visitors. Today, RHINO itself has become an
exhibit and is no longer operational. In this paper, we present RHINO-VR, an
interactive museum exhibit using virtual reality (VR) that allows museum
visitors to experience the historical robot RHINO in operation in a virtual
museum. RHINO-VR, unlike static exhibits, enables users to familiarize
themselves with basic mobile robotics concepts without the fear of damaging the
exhibit. In the virtual environment, the user is able to interact with RHINO in
VR by pointing to a location to which the robot should navigate and observing
the corresponding actions of the robot. To include other visitors who cannot
use the VR, we provide an external observation view to make RHINO visible to
them. We evaluated our system by measuring the frame rate of the VR simulation,
comparing the generated virtual 3D models with the originals, and conducting a
user study. The user-study showed that RHINO-VR improved the visitors'
understanding of the robot's functionality and that they would recommend
experiencing the VR exhibit to others.
