Technologies to Support Tourism Innovation and Cultural Heritage: Development of an Immersive Virtual Reality Application

Recent advances in technology and its applications have impacted fundamentally the tourism industry. Technological progress and innovations have for many years worked in facilitating the development of tourism [23, 31]. More recently, the emergence of new advanced technologies such as multimedia technologies, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have become key tools for tourism promotion and development. The use of these tools enhance travelers’ richness and interaction and provide them a simulated real visit and virtual experience before visiting the destination or the attraction [20]. Especially, VR technologies offer to travelers the possibility to get immersed in the digital world, and to navigate the real situations through a virtual environment [20]. As such these technologies have also created new opportunities for promotion and marketing of different tourism products such as destination cultural heritage, museums, parks etc [5, 11, 21, 28]. Following these developments in this paper we aim to present a technological solution that could be an innovative and valuable tool for tourism promotion of the area. In particular, the technological tool consists in the development of an app that uses Erasmus students as ambassadors for the promotion of the destination by providing tourists with a real immersive virtual reality experience