Have you really been there?
Musings on virtual vacations.
In the early days of the pandemic, a friend of mine mentioned that she had taken a virtual tour of Egypt. For a small fee, she joined the tour via Zoom and was taken around some of the major sites by local guides for a few hours. I marvelled that such a thing was possible, which of course it is, quite easily, and how quickly the lack of tourism brought on by the pandemic encouraged local tour guides to get entrepreneurial in supporting their livelihoods. Now, major TV travel programs feature virtual foreign tours where a local guide follows your instructions about where to go in exploring a travel destination, even going so far as to purchase souvenirs on your behalf.
Much the same thing is possible with Google or Apple Maps. A lot of the early fascination was and still is, that you can jump into street-view in a city that you want to visit or find vaguely interesting and essentially go on a virtual tour. This isn't live or inactive, but as a simulation of exploring a new place, it provides a dose of excitement and a drop of adventure.
It is not much of a leap to imagine that more immersive virtual vacations aren't far away. There is soon to be a revolution in virtual reality, again no doubt speeded up by the pandemic. With the technology becoming more powerful and more affordable, it is soon to be more widespread. Many things will be possible in VR, some that are not worth dwelling on, but there are certainly possibilities for virtual tourism. Taking a leaf from open-world gaming, a virtual tourist would enter a lifelike, interactive rending of a city, such as Venice, and explore it, more or less as if they were really there, but without the associated cost or environmental impact. It might even be better in one respect, as it would lack the throngs of people on the Rialto bridge.
Both of these examples beg the question that if you've been on a virtual vacation of some form, can you say that you've been to that place? And if you've been there on a virtual tour, does that mean you would still want to go there in real life?
It is hard to see that Zoom tours can genuinely satisfy the wanderlust and sense of adventure that many people have. Such a virtual tour might be a temporary fix for people restricted by the pandemic- a teaser or possibly a spoiler - but it can't replace the real thing. An immersive VR vacation is less obviously the case, but at least until VR approaches matrix-like capabilities that also give a complete sensory experience, which doesn't seem desirable or possible in the medium-term, it will be lacking.
And that's the point, isn't it? Sensory experience. VR might be able to trick your mind into believing what it is seeing and compensating for it physiologically, like when people start to feel motion-sick while watching a video of a roller-coaster. Nevertheless, this isn't close to the complete sensory experience you would get riding a roller-coaster in real life, or travelling. Experiencing anything is more than just what you see or hear - the things easily replicated in VR - it is what you smell, taste, feel under your feet and against your skin. A thousand little things that make the experience viscerally real and make you feel fully alive.
This is why many people like to travel and seek adventure, that feeling of being alive. It is certainly true that visiting new places, places that are not part of our daily lives makes us more switched on and aware. It is a hard-wired part of our biological survival mechanism. The brain starts to take notice of the unfamiliar surroundings in a way that it doesn't anymore on the daily commute. That heightened stimulation cognitively excites us and makes those travel experiences so memorable. And our memories can't just rely on the photographs we took.
In the Art of Travel, Alain De Botton remarks how many people experience travel through a camera lens. This is several steps closer than experiencing something through Zoom - you are really there - but it is still a step removed from the true experience. Many people take photos as trophies - mostly to show other people - and as a way to remind themselves, but in doing so they have a more circumscribed experience of the place they are in, and end up remembering it less. They snap a photo and move on, outsourcing their memory to a memory card rather than taking the time to be present and take it all in with their entire senses. In the same way that you could say that someone who just snapped a photo of the Mona Lisa didn't see it, they were just in the same room; you could say that someone who just snapped a travel photo for Instagram didn't really experience the view either, they were just in the same space. It makes for an ungratifying experience that is barely memorable at all.
In a world that is increasingly virtual, as reality is mediated through the prism of social media, and travel is something to be consumed rather than experienced, is it any wonder that people feel unsatisfied? Right now that is more true than ever, but in the same way, virtual vacations are consummative, not experiential, and must ultimately be unfulfilling. Travel at its best is an adventure that can deepen your understanding and widen your view of what it means to live, what life is and how the world works. By feeling, hearing, breathing, and interacting with people and cultures far from your own, you gain something that can never be compensated for by virtual reality. The same goes for the physical challenge of completing a hike or a kayak across a lake, any kind of adventure - it is something that you did, through your effort and your whole body feels it. If the world returns to any kind of normal, perhaps we should put down our devices, get out, explore, experience and appreciate the real world, more than we did before.