From sofa to safari — just press go

Summer holidays are off — but VR travel will set you free. From scaling Machu Picchu to going elephant spotting, Rosie Fitzmaurice has a virtual itinerary

IT’S 2pm on a snowy Sunday but before partaking in a snowball fight in the park, I’m off to the Bahamas to swim with hammerhead sharks. Why not? Not really, obviously, but with IRL travel off the agenda for now my solution, which involves a VR headset, is the next best thing. In fact, trips are booming as locked-down Londoners desperately search for new ways to keep ourselves entertained.

“VR can provide unique experiences that are nearly impossible in the real world,” says Kaitlyn Mullin, senior immersive producer at National Geographic. “For example, the opportunity to visit a normally heavily trafficked site like Machu Picchu when it is completely empty, or to safely have a faceto-face encounter with a wild lion.”

Get your head in the game

Searches for virtual reality goggles are up 180 per cent on last year. The most popular VR headset devices are made by the likes of Facebook’s Oculus, Sony’s Playstation and HTC — though they don’t come cheap, prices start at around £300. Oculus, whose Quest 2 headset I spent the weekend playing with and flopping between the Caribbean and Patagonia, says the brand is “selling headsets as fast as we can make them”. And, despite not having the slightest interest in gaming, I’m starting to see the draw.

How does it work? VR captures all 360 degrees of a chosen location, making the user feel utterly immersed in an entirely digital environment. The headset and controllers track your arm, leg and head movements in real time so that you can interact with the virtual setting as you would in real life.

The result is surprisingly thrilling (really). Think stomach lurch-inducing scaling Everest one minute and searching for penguin colonies in Antarctica with National Geographic the next. Take a trip into orbit and dock a space capsule with Nasa astronauts before enjoying a guided meditation somewhere a lot more zen than your living room. Lockdown escapism at its best.

Virtual tours from your smartphone

The good news is that there are plenty of online interactive virtual tours that can be enjoyed from your phone or laptop if you don’t have a VR headset. Lonely Planet writer Tom Hall points to free platforms like explore.org, which shares live cams of everything from African wildlife to the northern lights, as a great means of “keeping the flame burning” until you can next hop on a plane. “For example, I’ve just sat and watched a gorilla having lunch in the Congo and it’s made me realise that’s one of the first places I want to visit at the end of all of this.”

Zina Bencheikh, managing director of Intrepid Travel, says: “We have been working with start-up Local Purse (localpurse.com) to offer live virtual shopping experiences in places like the souks of Marrakech, where customers can browse and choose items as they explore the markets with a local guide. Our day tour brand (urbanadventures. com) is also giving customers the chance to enjoy virtual experiences with local guides, such as Indian cooking with a chef in Delhi.”

Beyond Covid-19

We’re all counting down the days until we can finally book that first post-pandemic holiday, but virtual travel will serve a purpose beyond lockdown, Bencheikh insists. “It will never compete with the spontaneity of real travel, the amazing little cafe you stumble upon as you wind through the streets of a new city or the human connections you make when you share a meal with a local family, I see it complementing real-life travel when it returns. As we all become more aware of our carbon impact, virtual experiences can be a fantastic way to explore those places that don’t quite make our bucket list.”

Mullin agrees, adding that allowing people to immerse themselves in places virtually could potentially help to reduce over-tourism. “Some of the world’s most unique sites are also among its most fragile, and excessive tourism could degrade delicate ancient landmarks,” she says. Ideally, VR in the travel space would help aid with the dispersal of visitors to certain tourist hotspots by promoting awareness of lesser-known places, Hall adds.