Virtual reality to the aid of tourism and heritage

What if immersive technologies reinvented access to culture, heritage and tourism? In strong development, tourism increases the risks of deterioration of sites and monuments as well as pollution, linked to air transport in particular. “Not to mention that the museums are over-visited, which harms the visitor experience. These problems are becoming critical. The VR [initiales de la réalité virtuelle en anglais] and the AR [idem pour la réalité augmentée] allow virtual visits of monuments or sites “better”, or even impossible experiences such as, for example, attending the funeral of Cheops while discovering the construction techniques of the pyramids,” notes Fabien Barati, co-founder and CEO of Emissive, a service company specialized in virtual or augmented reality.

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ScanPyramids VR, the virtual tour of the Cheops pyramid organized by the Cité de l’architecture in Paris, has been so successful that the operation will restart in September. The tour teleports a group of six people, equipped with a VR headset and accompanied by a guide, to the Giza plateau for forty-five minutes.

“This form of above-ground tourism or tourism 4.0 will develop without overshadowing tourism, which remains a time of experience elsewhere. The virtual allows multisensory experiences or impossible in reality, but it will not replace the ascent of Mont Blanc, for example,” predicts David Nahon, Director of Immersive Experience at Dassault Systèmes.

Flying over Notre-Dame before the fire

By transporting in time and in space, the virtual opens up new accesses to history, to knowledge, to discovery. For example, Timescope’s self-service virtual reality terminals give as many people as possible the opportunity to relive the capture of the Bastille, to discover life around the Galeries Lafayette in 1910 or to follow the construction of the citadel of Arras by Vauban in the seventeenth century.

Museums and tourist sites are beginning to adopt these technologies, which, in addition to contributing to the protection of heritage, appeal to the public. In one year of existence, FlyView360 has thus enabled 150,000 people to fly over Paris and its monuments, in particular to fly over Notre-Dame, whose 360 ° images were captured before the fire…

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