45 VR FOCUS E-tourism
mine growing up (published by Usborne) in which detailed cartoon pictures put a time-travelling kid into a Roman city, alongside Egyptians building the pyramids or defending a medieval castle. Gen Zers could soon do this with VR and perhaps even don haptic suits to fight, to make religious sacrifice, to live a dream. If that calls to mind the scene in Total Recall when Arnold Schwarzenegger buys two weeks’ worth of Martian travel memories that are “first-class” and “complete in every detail”, then don’t come running to us if it all goes wrong. Tourism’s digital journey is being charted at Lonely Planet, well-known publisher of guide books for independent travellers for over four decades, and more likely now to categorise itself as a platform. The company has now as many apps as print guides for destinations and enlists a network of travel bloggers, photographers, videographers and social media ‘pathfinders’ that create content and contribute to its online community. “The entire travel industry is taking baby steps into AR/VR but you need to have the assets and the infrastructure to build multimedia location-based content at scale,” says Lonely Planet CEO, Luis Cabrera. The company offers over a thousand tours from coast to canyons, Victoria Falls to Antarctica and has begun shooting 360 video for prospective travellers to try before they buy. Cabrera says the conversion rate into sales has been significant and REIMAGINING TRAVEL AT LONELY PLANET
IMAGINE ALLOWING WHEELCHAIR USERS TO EXPERIENCE THE HIMALAYAS AND TO FEEL THE WIND AND COLDNESS – THAT ISWHERE TECHNOLOGYWILL TAKE US
so plans to develop a lot more. But this is just the beginning. Lonely Planet has begun recording audio guides for people to download or stream from the LP app on walking tours. The next frontier is video. In partnership with 6D.ai Lonely Planet plans to scan and create 3D meshes of interiors of places like museums, hotels and AirbnB rooms. 6D.ai offers tools for building fully navigable 3D maps of locations just using smartphones. When tourists visit these sites for real, using the Lonely Planet app they can then view rich data, images and information about the site overlaid on top of the image displayed through their phone’s camera. “Ultimately, the big vision is to allow people to travel even when they can’t,” Cabrera says. “The notion of allowing people to go to Machu Picchu without setting foot in Peru, and to feel the wind around them as they navigate their way up the Inca Trail, will become more powerful.”
“Imagine allowing wheelchair users to experience the Himalayas and to feel the wind and coldness – that is where technology will take us.” SPATIAL COMPUTING Cabrera is keen to use the term spatial computing to describe this future connectivity. Neither VR nor AR, spatial computing is a means of interfacing seamlessly with rich digital experiences fully or partially overlaid on reality. He believes that the tourist market will be the first to adopt spatial computing. Lonely Planet is testing applications for Magic Leap and with Apple ARKit in which users will wear a form of AR glasses to explore the three-dimensional virtual world around them. “One idea is that the user sees a floating globe, perhaps a massive 3D model of Paris, which they can spin with their hands in Minority Report fashion. You can zoom in until you reach a certain point where 360 video wraps around you.” He adds, “The business model will emerge – though it’s not a clear one yet.” At the beginning these experiences will be recorded (on-demand) but 5G-boosted mobile broadband will make real time interactions possible. “You could be on a cruise ship enjoying Christmas Day and use VR to invite your extended family to the party. You can imagine opening a portal wherever you are for your family and friends to see what you are seeing.” This dovetails with wider trends in telecommunications and environmental priorities where remote working and video conferencing (telepresence) becomes the norm. Not surprisingly, Lonely Planet is foregrounding green credentials. Bhutan tops its list of countries to visit in 2020 because of its efforts in sustainable tourism. LP is also creating AR/VR experiences showing the timeline of man-made impact on sites such as the Australian Great Barrier Reef. Addressing the climate crisis might mean we don’t get to travel as much, but if VR makes good on its promise, we may be able to see more than we ever thought possible.
He envisages using haptic and sensory feedback – smell, noise, atmospheres – familiar from 4D cinema theme park rides to deliver even more immersive experiences.
GOGGLEBOX Alongside VR goggles, users might be able to experience haptic and sensory feedback to make their ‘travel’ experience richer
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