11 Scope of virtual reality and augmented reality in tourism and its innovative applications

The novel advent of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) has revealed glorious doors for several industries to satisfy the needs of their customer experience. Like many outstanding industries, the travel and tourism industry has also improved its trends and technology with the benefit of VR and AR. AR is exhibiting an incredible part in transfiguring the tourism landscape and heightening the travel involvement for vacationers. In today’s speeding world, many people travel around the globe and they look for better places to visit frequently to seek different environmental experiences. During their travel, tourism lovers keep on searching for places to visit and booking hotels and resorts on the go. So, if a travel agency wants to catch a traveler’s attention with extensively changing travel applications, AR-established transit applications can help them by contributing a distinctive modest improvement. Like VR, AR adds digital features on top of the real world to provide a rich and beautiful experience of the locations that already exist. There are limitless advantages to AR in travel apps. It has a great deal of potential to support and provide creative innovations to the travel and tourism sector. There are many fantastic and growing uses for AR and VR that might benefit tourist commerce. Basically, the main objective of AR is that it improves and modifies how individuals see their immediate environment when viewed through a specific gadget. The creation of novel travel applications benefits impressively from AR and it becomes a treasured tool for businesses and vendors. The surroundings can be observed and enjoyed by the customers in their own way. The travel apps created on AR may easily draw users with their interactive and immersive experiences. It is very reasonable to say that AR may provide outstanding marketing experiences and can be used in the tourist business in a variety of ways. AR can be utilized and easily practiced in any smart electronic device and it is also very cheap as it could be never dreamt of when compared to VR devices. A wide range of crucial and sophisticated tasks are covered by the travel and tourism industry, including local transportation, accommodations, hospitality, and tourist sites. AR plays a vital role in the travel and tourism domain even if it is a smart young field in technical sciences. With so much potential to alter each of these areas, AR in tourism has a promising future. With the most intrinsic uses of AR, here are some assured illustrations of how AR can be used in travel app development. This chapter elucidates the prevailing and innovative AR travel applications and their use cases. Various location-based, marker-based, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) applications will be discussed in this chapter, and its advantages, as well as the future scope, will be enlightened.