Leveraging Digital Marketing for Tourism by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783031885822
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

2 Virtual Reality in Tourism

2.1 Defining Virtual Reality (VR)

Broadly, VR is recognized as virtual environments, virtual worlds, or microworlds (Gigante, 1993) or “the systems that provide synthetic experiences” (Beck et al., 2019, p. 589). As a term it has been used differently (Beck et al., 2019) such as the experience itself (Kim, 2005), or to describe the technology in terms of its own distinct devices (Beck et al., 2019).

There has not yet been a mutually accepted definition of VR among researchers. VR definitions range from describing immersiveness, such as “the illusion of participation in a synthetic environment rather than external observation of such an environment … VR is an immersive, multisensory experience” (Gigante, 1993, p. 3) to more simple ones based on technology, VR is “an advanced, human-computer interface that simulates a realistic environment. The participants can move around in the virtual world. They can see it from different angles, reach into it, grab it, and reshape it …” (Zheng et al., 1998, p. 20).

According to Spielmann and Orth (2021), VR experiences can range from simple (e.g., seeing static images) to advanced (e.g., navigating through high-resolution 360-degree panoramic content) and full-body suits. Others claim that it is all about devices and user-control navigation (de Lurdes Calisto & Sarkar, 2024). According to Guttentag (2010, p. 638), VR is defined as: “the use of a computer-generated 3D environment—called a ‘virtual environment’ (VE)—that one can navigate and possibly interact with, resulting in real-time simulation of one or more of the user’s five senses.”

Unquestionably, two concepts on which VR relies upon are immersion and presence (Beck et al., 2019, Slater & Sanchez-Vives, 2016) and Zheng et al. added interactivity (1998) to the formula. The level of immersion is defined “as the extent to which the user feels disconnected from the real world” (de Lurdes Calisto & Sarkar, 2024; Guttentag, 2010; McLean & Barhorst, 2022) and depends on the devices used (from mobile devices add-on to head-mounted displays [HMD]) (Bogicevic et al., 2019, de Lurdes Calisto & Sarkar, 2024). As demonstrated, the interactive technology helps immersion into the experience more quickly (Komarac & Došen, 2022).

However, presence is understood as “the psychological state where a user is feeling lost or immersed in the mediated environment, the degree to which he or she feels physically ‘present’ in a virtual environment” (Tussyadiah et al., 2018, p. 141) and the sense of presence is crucial to VR’s efficacy in different use contexts (Tussyadiah et al., 2018). This sense of presence is achieved when VR technology provides visitors with seamless moving around a virtual environment (such as in a virtual museum) (Komarac & Došen, 2024). Interactivity is about the users who can make movements and interact with the virtual environment just like in the real environment (Flavián et al. 2019). Thus, both VR and AR can be the foundation for the co-creation of the experience and consequently enhance the overall tourism experience (Matečić & Ioannides, 2019).

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