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Virtual Tourism

No ticket, no suitcase, no problem! The Internet is bringing worldly experiences within reach.
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With processing power and bandwidth capacities becoming ever cheaper, faster and better, high-quality multimedia and rich content have entered virtually every facet of life. Tourism has been no exception.

Virtual tourism, the activity of "visiting" sites of interest over the Internet without having to physically travel to them, can take on many forms. An early form of virtual tourism presents the user with a slideshow or video which explores a limited area, for example, a museum. Some museums offer a 3D graphical interface that allows one to explore the attraction site using simple directional camera controls. Most of these early efforts met with limited success and didn't really take off for various reasons, among them the limited ability to immerse the user in a believable environment.

Recently, there has been a revival of photo-based virtual tourism interest, with a notable example being the GigaPan Project  jointly sponsored by NASA, Carnegie Mellon University, Google and National Geographic Society. Gigapan hosts extremely high resolution panoramic photos (a gigapixel-resolution) online. The resolution allows for incredibly detailed images that people may zoom in on and pan across at will.

Another Internet-based location is Linden Lab's Second Life . In the online world of Second Life, people may buy virtual property, make virtual goods that can be sold for real money, and interact with a diverse group of other users in an alternate reality. In what turned out to be one of the first of many such activities, the Dresden Museum decided to place its Old Masters collection online; every item in the collection was reproduced digitally, and placed in the Second Life universe for anyone to see. There has been an increasing trend of tourism organizations sponsoring virtual sites inside worlds like Second Life, which faithfully reproduce a real-life location. Thus it allows users to embark on a virtual tour of, say, the fabled Chichen Itza from the comfort of their homes. While the primary goal of endeavors like these is to promote tourism, they offer a quick getaway to those too busy to visit these exotic locations themselves.

Helping virtual tourism are technologies like Google's Street View and related Web 2.0 technologies. Google's Street View lets a user tour a city from a pedestrian standpoint, and virtually take a walk around the city. Expanding on the concept, some sites now offer free video tours of a city; the user is invited to tour a city on Street View, and at specific points, watch a short user-created video of the place. With Google taking over YouTube, users can easily embed videos hosted on YouTube on the Google Maps service, offering an engrossing interactive environment for the new breed of virtual tourists. A good starting point for these activities is a blog devoted to the topic, Virtual Tourism .

In fact, this trend has grown to the point of companies offering professional services to "virtualize" your brand. For example, K Zero  claims to be the "resident expert in virtual worlds," and offers many informative articles on its site for the interested traveler.

References

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