City Tours with AR & VR offer tourism unlimited possibilities to engage the consumer, tourist visits could become more interesting and particularly attractive for all types of visitors, including the youngest. Virtual reality involves the use of a headset, which helps to bring a user into a digital environment. Through the use of images and sounds, the user is placed in a virtual world, in which she can move around and interact with the environment. Augmented reality city guides can create a fun, interactive and flexible way of visiting the city.
Immersive City Tours create an interesting new way to explore a new and unfamiliar city as well as cultural heritage sites. Using dedicated AR & VR applications for mobile or wearable devices, pieces of useful information can appear at certain locations, for example playing videos of major attractions, displaying tourist itineraries and also offering the possibility for users to set a destination and create a customized route according to their needs and tastes.
AR & VR City Tours combine new advances in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies to provide travellers with more exciting and smart tour guiding experiences. Wherever they are, users can take advantage of these technologies to experience their next travel adventure. The use of 3D and other multimedia content can help capture users’ attention through sensory experiences, stimulate or recreate certain moods and feelings, create stimuli and invite action.
Let AR & VR apps become your personal City Guide
Every city has a wonderful history, hidden around every corner of it, through City Tours you can discover lesser known places, bring historical buildings back to life exactly where they were, linking the past with the present and learning every detail of the city’s history.
City Tours with AR & VR also allow access to those tourist attractions that, due to certain characteristics such as fragility or danger, are not normally accessible to all, thus eliminating the ecological impact of mass tourism or safety risks. Thanks to these new technologies, it is possible to touch a stalactite that has taken thousands of years to form without running the risk of blocking its normal growth process.
Moreover, transforming and converting stressful travel planning into a fun experience such as searching for accommodation, transport, restaurants or reviews can become an adventure in itself with 3D animations.
Exploring accommodations with AR & VR before booking
For example, in the Hotel industry, Augmented Reality travel apps offer unlimited opportunities to engage guests and increase the chances of bookings. Information content visualized in an immersive way, also with the support of gamification techniques, can motivate guests to check out 360° room tours and interact with all the available services. You can impress your guests with indoor AR navigations that show a full range of hotel services in an engaging yet intuitive way.
Adding a layer of digital guidance, visual content and even 3D characters for entertainment, to the exact physical location, makes travel guides more specific, more informative and interactive for tourists. AR applications convert your mobile phone into your own personal virtual travel guide. AR allows you to receive captivating information as you walk. AR content can also be shared on social media in real time, helping foster word of mouth processes.
Try before you buy
Through a “Try before you buy” approach, Augmented and virtual reality can offer hotels, travel agents and other tourism businesses the opportunity to let potential customers experience travel locations virtually. This means that users will be able to experience attractions they are likely to visit, take a dip in the sea or a walk in the mountains, from the comfort of their sofa at home. The actual destination experience. Using a VR visor, people can discover the beauty of the desired destination, with the aim of stimulating in them the desire to visit it live. The user is transported to unique places, feeling like the protagonist of a story that unfolds around him.
Benefits of using City tours with AR & VR
The Japanese call it the ‘Paris syndrome’, or the disappointment of those who arrive at their destination, during a long planned and desired trip, to discover that the place they are visiting does not meet their expectations. In some cases, the disappointment is so strong that the tourist is forced to cut the trip short. Virtual reality allows for a complete revolution in the concept of ‘information material’, transcending even multimedia and allowing the traveller to immerse himself entirely in the experience of the place he is going to visit.
Augmented and virtual reality applied to the travel sector makes experiences richer, safer, more accessible and increasingly exciting as users explore through city tours, visit cities by virtually walking through their interiors, view main attractions and information through a new modality that creates curiosity in users. The aim is to create interactive content that accompanies the visitor throughout the experience and builds loyalty. 75% of customers say that the use of city tours has had a critical impact on their travel booking decisions.
Numerous studies demonstrated that users spend 5-10 times more time on websites that offer the possibility to travel directly from the couch at home, connecting people with often distant physical spaces. In addition, integrating a Virtual Tour on your website will result in 30% more interactions and contacts and a 20% increase in visitors.
AR & VR can offer experiences and information in different languages. Tourists travelling through foreign cities can get informational and content, translations of signs and much more by simply framing a QR code or framing the work itself with their smartphone to get the information and details in their preferred language.
Taking a trip through augmented reality allows you to organise it better. The journey will be original, attractive and fun. The power of augmented reality lies in immersion, seeing reality virtually and then touching it.