Does a tourist need VR and AR?

In recent years, Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies are widely used in tourism together with introducing innovations in all social scene.

In our opinion, we need to understand where it is necessary and where it would prevent developing of real smart tourism as VR and AR do not turn a city or museum into smart in a snap.

Moreover, VR and AR deflect tourist’s attention from receiving real cultural patterns of destination or museum. He can use VR or AR any time at home, but during a travel he wants to see true authentic objects.

In addition, these technologies have notable disadvantages. 

• Need for huge Internet traffic. Often, tourists use Internet very carefully as costs may be high. 

• Need for special equipment. In a high stream of tourists, VR and AR glasses have to be aseptisized, and probably, changed quite often. 

• High costs. It is diversion of museum and destination resources to unimportant things instead of doing necessary things e.g. solving the problem of multilanguage tourist content: creating multilanguage audioguides, multilanguage signs etc. 

On the other hand, VR and AR are good to prepare a travel, when a tourist can virtually visit a place he is going to travel. That is why, in our opinion, VR and AR should be placed not in museums or cities but on their websites.  

Based on the above, we recommend museums and DMO to introduce innovations carefully, and remember that innovations must improve and simplify travel experience but not to be “innovations for innovations”.