Trend: Virtual Travel in China

Virtual tours of famous locations are a new trend in China and quickly becoming a popular alternative to real travels.

Zuo Xuan from the Beijing CScout office recently featured this trend on our China Blog.

Trend Description:
Before you come to Beijing, you might have a full plan to visit places like the Palace Museum, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace; if you could stay longer and tour around China, you might add more places like Guilin, Xi’an, Shangri-la, and Lhasa on your list. But such perfect plans might wear away for various reasons, like lack of money and time or a fear over the traffic jams on national holidays at those popular places. Now you can make it easily just by sitting before a computer screen. Virtual Reality websites offer high-definition panoramic views of many places in this country and other parts of the world.

Cases:

City8, the Shanghai-based virtual reality map website, is probably the first among its kind in the world. The web offers virtual panoramic maps of eight major cities in China, like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Wenzhou etc. And other 26 city maps are coming soon.

The web designers said the idea came from their puzzles using the digital maps, such as Google Earth. Users may miss a place even with the guidance of satellite-viewed digital maps because they may fail in transferring the digital distance and location into reality. However, with the new maps, users can check out the location by satellite digital maps first and then click on the panoramic views to see how the vistas really look like.

For those who are not looking for locations, the website can also be an eye-opener if they are interested in geography or history of certain places. If they feel like to share their own experiences, say they were on the spot of an accident and took some pictures of it, they can upload images to tell people the surroundings at critical moment.

Compared with City8, ChinaVR has no focus on mapping. Instead, it organizes panoramic views on a variety of themes, such as the newly-finished “the fifth subway line in Beijing”, “the ancient cities in China”, “Super Girls competition”, “Mao Zedong” etc.

As China’s first virtual reality website (started in 1998), it claims to have more than 50,000 panoramic views, among which about 10,000 can be viewed now. Another advantage of the website is that it is designed in four languages: Chinese, English, Deutsch and Japanese. International virtual tourists can also visit it easily and submit their images.

Virtualsweden is a similar website run in Sweden. Started in 2003, it contains urban images, image of news events, panoramic tours of great museums and so on. To view the images, users can simply install Apple’s software Quick Time and no bother of registration to the site.

Trend Impact:
Some may say virtual touring is not perfect. Where are the feelings when you touch a real stone and smell the fragrance of the nature in a real tour? But think about the stuffed buses, the flows of travelers, racketeering of local hawkers and finally bad weather conditions that may keep you away from the best of the sceneries, you may find virtual tours a good idea. Besides, you can visit any place at any time with a computer connected to the Internet. It helps you know more about our world.

Links
City 8
China VR
Virtual Sweden

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