Especially after the Pandemic, the travel industry is booming now more than ever. As such, there is a lot of innovation happening in the space, especially with regards to digital tools such as extended reality.
The obvious first thought is that XR could in many ways replace the experience of travel, as you are able to be transported anywhere with the click of the on button on your headset. However, VR could never take away the magic of experiencing another country, city, or state in person and engaging with the people who live there. I will focus this blog on exploring ways that XR can augment the travel experience, rather than replace it.
Firstly, AR has the capability to turn every traveler into an instant local guide. With AR-enabled apps, visitors can use their smartphones to receive real-time information about nearby landmarks, restaurants, and attractions, overlaid onto the actual environment around them. This not only simplifies navigation but also enriches the overall travel experience by providing context and historical information about the surroundings in an immersive and engaging way. In previous blog posts, I’ve mentioned examples of AR technology put to use at museums in Los Angeles, such as the La Brea Tar Pits AR experience. Scientists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and La Brea Tar Pits teamed up with USC researchers and designers to recreate Ice Age animals for the metaverse. By using Snapchat, Instagram or Sketchfab, users can photograph and film these Ice Age animals as if they were meandering through present-day Los Angeles.
Choosing the perfect accommodation is a critical aspect of travel, especially for school trips or business trips, where many people are staying in the same accommodations, or venues need to be booked for live events. XR is enabling virtual hotel tours, allowing potential guests to explore rooms, amenities, and common areas in a fully immersive way. This transparency helps in managing expectations and ensures that guests are making informed decisions based on their preferences. It also can serve as a marketing tool for the hotels themselves, to really sell their experience to potential customers. For example, during its off-season, Quebec’s famous “Ice Hotel” offers 360 virtual tours of their unique architecture (composed of 40,000 tons of snow and 500 tons of ice), building up anticipation and excitement for their opening in January (The Spaces). This experience is super cool in itself, but also serves the purpose of encouraging people to book- if it is that breathtaking online, it must be even more so in person!
Looking to the future of XR usage, it will likely become a part of how we track parts of our daily lives, similar to the invention of the smartphone. In that vein, the travel experience doesn’t end when you return home. XRcan enhance post-travel memories by offering immersive content creation options. Travelers can use VR to relive their experiences, sharing their journeys with friends and family in a more engaging and vivid manner. This is something that Apple’s Vision Pro has used in their marketing materials- that their headset will allow people to step into their memories and experience their photos and videos in a highly immersive way.
The future of how we travel and experience the world is changing with the evolution of XR technology. It can serve, in many ways, as a method of augmenting our engagement with culture when we travel, whether it’s to our own backyards or across the world.
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