Travel and Tourism through VR
How the consumer VR boom has made sneak peeks into popular travel spots way too real! — shikhar verma, Chayan Kosambia
At this very moment, you’re looking at the screen, reading this, gathering info, each word, each pixel, and *ting* a notification pops on your phone, a car honks frantically outside, and instantly you are pulled out of what you’re reading, affecting its impact.
This is way too normal now-a-days & this is not something which can be turned down with when consuming current content mediums.
We, at Melzo, are looking to bridge this gap of distraction between content and reality, by creating a platform which will provide everyone a way to create, discover and consume interactive, immersive VR experience.
Today we will discuss how did VR draw the attention of a market of tourism generally late at adopting the upcoming technology.
VR in Travel and Tourism
Fasten your seatbelts for a flight departing to Paris, via Australia, after making a pit-stop in Dubai — and yet, never leave the ground
Yes, you read it correctly. Immerse yourselves in 360-degree virtual reality (VR) tour of the places all across the globe from right where you stand.
There has been an ongoing debate concerning the topic of Virtual Reality as a substitute for real travel. The topic has been widely discussed by both academics and practitioners. For example, at a discussion at the ITB 2016, the common viewpoint by everyone was that technology has not the power to replace the emotional experience of real travel. As per the fact, VR won’t be able to replace the emotions when we meet people and visit places, the odors we smell when roaming along streets and the taste when we eat food. It is believed that VR is rather complementing than substituting real travel.
As many of us know, VR has been an eye-opener in many verticals since the big break in 2013/2014. Clearly, it is amazing to virtually visit Asia, USA or Europe via VR goggles. Therefore, it is not surprising that almost everyone who is introduced to VR for the first time is astonished by the 360 experience, and so are repeat viewers! But like all early stage technologies, theres a major question that needs answering.
How long will VR remain interesting?
Now this completely depends on the kind and quality of available content which essentially boils down to content creation utilities. What exactly is it that makes VR so auspicious in the long run; the experience itself or the kind of content?
As per our research, in the tourism industries after discussion with dozens of tourism professionals, it shows that all of them are really enthusiastic about adopting VR with the only major concern being, how can it be made be easy to understand and use at the consumer end. They all know that VR has a huge potential in the travel & tourism industry but don’t know how to tap into it.
The best possible way to solve this is to try out a variety of interesting content directly into the market!
Also discussed earlier in our blog, Melzo is a web-based platform for simplified XR content creation. This particular web-based platform allows us to solve the problem which is described above for tourism vertical. Melzo has not just allowed people to explore and experience the horizon of Virtual Reality but it also helps people to customized there own VR Experience which is device agnostic, adaptive & progressive.
With the help of Melzo, we are empowering people to create customized Virtual Reality content and make it shareable with a just single link. Creating the content as per the requirements of the clients with lots of permutations and combinations; VR can be a huge asset for tourism industries.
