40 VR FOCUS E-tourism
Tourism has been one of the first sectors to adopt VR and AR technology. As climate change anxiety presses us to reduce our carbon footprint, could VR become a new way of seeing the world? AROUND THE WORLD Words by Adrian Pennington
here we would be without Google Maps? Mobile connectivity has transformed the tourist experience into
The travel industry was one of the first to adopt VR. It’s becoming a staple marketing tool to allow people to ‘experience’ before they buy. This goes for virtual tours of hotels and cruise ships to digital experiences of nearby attractions as tasters for what to expect. Honeymooners are a captive audience. Museums are another major adopter of VR, both as a means to take collections on tour and as location-based VR to enhance visitor knowledge of the exhibit – an extension of the familiar handheld audio translator guide. As Sir David Attenborough put it, “The one thing that really frustrates you in a museum is when you see something really fascinating, you don’t want to be separated
from it by glass.“ He was introducing Hold the World, a VR app made for Sky about London’s Natural History Museum in which Attenborough appeared as a hologram. “You want to be able to look at it and see the back of it and turn it around and so on.” There are dozens of virtual museum experiences. Google has even captured several exhibits as light fields, including one of the Discovery Shuttle. “Filming in 360° only captures one perspective on how different materials react to light,” explains Google’s light field and VR lead, Paul Debevec, at the View Conference in Turin last month. “Light fields can give a more realistic sense of presence than VR by producing motion parallax and extremely realistic textures and lighting.”
something much more efficient and customised, and it might be on the verge of an upgrade to first class with the addition of AR and VR. So hot is this aspect of the industry that the dominant electronics show, CES, is featuring a Travel & Tourism exhibit for the first time and, in another first, handing a keynote to an airline operator (Delta Airlines). “Biometrics, AR/VR, mobile technology and more are simplifying travel today and fundamentally changing travel in the future,” says Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CTA, the group that runs CES.
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