The Travel Industry in the VR Era

It’s pretty hard to beat a “top of the world” moment like jumping into the air at Machu Picchu’s highest point. Yes, it’s a clichéd photo op—but for a most exhilarating reason: You can’t fully take in this singular 360-degree experience (complete with the high-altitude-induced breathlessness) any way but in person.

Yet when I finally did it seven years ago, it felt wonderfully familiar. I’d been anticipating a visit to the iconic Inca citadel since I was a teenager by watching any and all documentaries, IMAX films and old-school travelogue presentations—the kind run by a real person using a clicker and a carousel of tiny slides on top of a projector—about Peru. Thanks to these technologies, I already knew the place (at least a little bit) before I arrived. That extra layer of intimacy greatly enriched how connected I felt there and the strength of the memories I formed.

I think the two best things technology can do for travel are getting our mouths watering to see a place in real life and virtually transporting us into destinations most of us likely won’t ever be able to reach in person. Technology broadens the scope of where we can actually “travel”—and how we may see the world. From FOMO-inducing geo-tagged #nofilter Instagram posts and live camera feeds right up to new travel video games and the latest virtual reality apps, digital tech is gifting us with an increasingly rich taste of “as close as you can get without actually being there.”

The easiest way to do this right now is by downloading a VR app onto a smartphone that you then slip into a headset by Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift or Google Daydream (or even a low-tech cardboard version) to view 360-degree videos. VR travel apps like Ascape and Jaunt VR transport you to dozens of countries around the world for a few minutes at a time—from Paris to Tokyo to Moscow.

National Geographic’s View-Master Wildlife app takes you on a personal safari with the world’s most arresting animals—or you can opt for Nat Geo’s exclusive visit to Yosemite National Park with none other than Barack Obama. Tourism boards, airlines, tour companies and a variety of brands have launched their own VR travel apps and 360-degree YouTube videos. G Adventures takes you sailing on the Ganges River in India, The North Face leads you on a walk through a village in Nepal and Cartier even takes you back in time to relive the history of its New York flagship store.

The technology is so new that the quality of these experiences can vary greatly from one VR platform and 360-degree video to the next. (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently said, “I don’t think that good virtual reality is fully there yet.”) But some of the best work—in particular the VR created by Emblematic Group, based in Santa Monica, Calif., and NYT VR Virtual Reality by The New York Times—is being done to showcase places that you can’t realistically go to, like the streets of Aleppo in Syria, alongside Iraqis fighting ISIS or inside a meticulous digital recreation of a solitary confinement cell in a U.S. prison.

These eye-opening destinations don’t currently appear on any real-life travel bucket list, but they are worthy of a VR travel list. Although they are sometimes hard to take in, I’ve checked these virtual visits off my VR list because they provide me with a new perspective, an opportunity to learn, and they’ve increased my empathy, compassion and desire to help make the world a better place for everyone (which are also some of the reasons why I like to travel in real life). VR travel provides as close an experience as we can currently get to walking in someone else’s shoes.

VR travel provides as close an experience as we can currently get to walking in someone else’s shoes.

There is one more not-to-be-missed real-life place that VR travel can take us: space (the final frontier!). Last year, I became mesmerized with a new “video” of the Milky Way that had just been released. It’s actually a scrolling 12-metre-long picture of the galaxy—coloured in cosmic blues, reds and pinks—that takes eight minutes to watch. This composite image, captured by the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope in Chile, is four times larger—and much more detailed—than any previous snapshot, but it’s still only a minuscule fraction of the galaxy. I often watch it as a kind of meditation before I go to bed.

No addition of a tiny “you are here” arrow on a galactic map will ever be powerful enough to help me hold on to the vastness of what is still out there to explore—on our own planet and beyond. So I am more than happy to take advantage of every possible digital and real-world way to do that. I’ll be packing hiking boots, space boots and VR boots too.

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