Virtual reality: is it really the future of travel?
Seb Emina explores the world (from his bedroom) to find out whether VR will ever replace the real thing
Iwent to the Taj Mahal today. I’ve never been before. It was beautiful. When I say “went” I mean virtually, of course. India is still in lockdown, and France, where I live, is a kind of grey zone: open to an extent but with movement from one place to another largely discouraged.
The idea of actual travel seems laughable. So I’ve been wondering instead about a form of activity which, like flying cars or domestic robots, has always felt like it would signify having arrived in “the future”: namely, that I might go away without actually leaving home.
My Taj Mahal visit was facilitated through an iPhone encased in a Google Cardboard headset (some foldable card with a pair of embedded eye-lenses). I held it to my eyes and surveyed the 17th-century Mughal mausoleum. Tourists streamed past the camera and music played. When I turned my head, the image turned with it. The clip was 90 seconds long. It was travel in the way that looking at a hologram on a postcard is travel, which is to say: it wasn’t. It was, I have to confess, somewhat boring.
To be fair, this was the first virtual tour I’d unearthed and I’d taken it using some of the most rudimentary equipment available. Yet most agree that, while the current technology is great for gaming, it has some way to go before it can fully deliver on the more intangible pleasures denoted by the word “travel”.
“If virtual travel ever catches on,” the futurist Ian Pearson tells me via email, “it will probably be due to multisensory capabilities enabled by ‘active skin’, with IT linking nerves to the net. It will allow touch to be recorded and replayed, so people will be able to feel they are actually there, as well as see and hear.”
Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois announced a working prototype of active skin last year: they call it “epidermal VR”. But it’s just one possible path to what is known in the industry as “full immersion” or “full dive” virtual reality. A recently launched Elon Musk start-up called Neuralink is working to develop “brain machine interfaces” which might some day allow a beach in Naxos to be beamed straight into my mind – removing the necessity for mediation though skin or eyes.
In the more imminent future, many point to the revolutionary potential of augmented reality (AR), in which the world around us becomes layered with live digital content.
“Apple and other tech brands are likely to introduce augmented reality eyewear next year that will provide a data-rich overlay on the real world,” says Mike Walsh, CEO of consultancy firm Tomorrow.
“They will change our experience of exotic places when we are lucky enough to be in them, or if not, add exotic elements to the mundane world we find ourselves stuck in.”
Last year, for example, Microsoft demonstrated a project called DreamWalker, in which a headset-wearing person on the move (in this case on the leafy Microsoft campus near Seattle) could experience their walking route as taking place somewhere completely different (a street in Manhattan). Various trackers and sensors ensure any physical obstacles in the real world are mirrored in the virtual one. If the project develops into a consumer product, the possibilities are endless: the London Underground could appear as the Paris Metro. Birmingham’s Bull Ring Centre can be a pliable Machu Picchu.
But what about my predicament? Holly Friend, travel specialist at trend forecaster The Future Laboratory, suggests I try one of Airbnb’s online experiences. While not “virtual” in the sense of scrutinising, say, Egyptian pyramids from lots of angles, they tap into one of travel’s other great enticements: “They’re great for actually introducing real dialogue with people.”
I sign up for a trip to a Croatian olive oil orchard, carried out over the videoconferencing platform Zoom. Our host, Marin, is a young, 14th-generation farmer based in the mountains near Split. Most of the talk is carried out in the farm’s cellar, with bottles of oil and schnapps strewn around. Attendees are asked to introduce themselves. “It’s my 20th Airbnb experience,” says a guest in California named Christopher. “I’ve been all around the world this way.”
Marin describes the farm’s production methods and we do a communal tasting, each guest bringing whatever olive oil they have at home. Afterwards, our host takes us for a walk through the farm, green leaves and walls of rough grey stone warping in and out of focus with the bandwidth of my connection.
An almost authentic travel moment occurs when he introduces us to his grandmother, who doesn’t speak English and grins silently at the six faces gazing at her from kitchens and verandas internationally.
Airbnb is a company associated with travel, and this was, to use their term, an experience. But was it, in itself, travel?
It had many of the qualities I’d expect from a tour I might take during a summer break, but I was still, in the end, sitting at my desk. Normal life, and my laptop’s picturesque desktop image, were waiting for me once I clicked the words “leave meeting”. I didn’t feel like I’d been to Croatia, not even a little.
Perhaps it’s a mistake to look for the same things from tech-enabled travel as we do from its real-world equivalent, at least for now. Darren Emerson, an award-winning director of VR documentaries, says that, while he doesn’t think a simulation can be comparable to actually going on holiday, it is “good at taking you to places you’d never be able to access.”
In 2018, his company produced an experience entitled Inner Selfie, in which users could sit and talk with the Dalai Lama. This is, as he says, “not something you could ever really do”.
Nor is visiting the caves at Chauvet, which, as home to the world’s oldest cave paintings, are out of bounds to tourists of any kind, yet visitable in VR form thanks to Google’s Arts & Culture platform. As for the wilder predictions about what’s further down the line, it’s hard not to think that concepts such as travel will mean something completely different in a world where we can inject sensory data directly into our consciousness. According to the paper Microsoft published to accompany its DreamWalker demo: “It is entirely possible that future VR users may interrupt their VR sessions merely to accomplish real-world activities, such as bathroom breaks or going to sleep.”
Technology might some day allow a beach in Naxos to be beamed straight into my mind