TRAVEL ANYWHERE YOU WANT WITH VIRTUAL REALITY
Virtual reality may be the next best way to visit the destinations that have been lighting up your social media- this can happen even without you moving
The hesitation to utilizing virtual reality is common to many. It was an unforgettable experience says a narrator who travelled using virtual reality. Let’s see how the experience was for the writer.
On a tour to Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) to check out their spacewalk VR Transporter, enticed by the ability to see places and things that one could never visit without time, price, or travel.
On a visit to the museum, it’s best to always book ahead of time and arrive early. When you’ve been cooped up in your house for months, museums might feel like an amusement park. While awaiting the height test, the writer decided to travel through several displays
VR Transporter is a small-group experience that you can share with up to three other people.
Being a person who uses glasses, the writer wanted to wear her eye glasses with the headset, thinking that the experience wouldn’t be complete without the eye glasses, hilarious I must say. And as expected the attendant explained that could not be done.
Putting away the glasses, there was an immediate feeling of the dynamic motion of being in outer space. The narrator’s legs were in the air, wanting to avoid debris. Strapped in a chair at a museum, but the brain and body responded to the heaving of being a spacecraft passenger.
The event came to a close with a breathtaking view of a rocket ship, and when the railing was raised, then came fuzzy nearsightedness. In comparison to the actual world, the limpidity of VR reality is quite impressive. Every roller coaster encounter for breakfast was devoured by VR Transporter, says the narrator.
“Because of its popularity, MSI is going to add a second VR Transporter experience,” says Julie Parente, MSI’s head of public relations. Pulseworks, the company that created VR Transporter, has it available in 20 places across the country, most of which are museums.
Residents of Illinois can take advantage of “free days,” which waive museum admission and reduce the cost of experiencing virtual reality to as little as $10. On a typical day, there are a variety of deals available, but admittance plus a VR ticket costs $32. While virtual reality may transport us to locations we’ve never visited before, it can also transport us back to places that are meaningful to us.
Virtual reality may be the next best way to visit the destinations that have been lighting up your social media or are on your bucket list after you’ve used up all of your vacation days or travel money.
International travel and huge events have been sluggish to return in the post-vaccine period
Ceek, a virtual event and experience streaming service, attempts to combine travel and concert ecstasy.
Ceek CEO Mary Spio states, “We want to create an experience that moves individuals over time and space.” Ceek is based in Miami, but company also has offices in Ghana, where Spio grew up. Ceek is designed to allow people visit destinations virtually, in addition to the work they undertake to imitate the social experience of attending a real event.
What’s unique about Ceek is how it uses technology to reimagine concert experiences by taking first-time visitors to Africa — or nostalgics — on a tour of the country’s most beautiful vistas and must-see monuments.
Sarkodie, a Ghanaian musician, begins his performance on Ceek by standing on the Black Star on Accra’s Independence Square monument before dropping onto the stage.
“Inside the application, we have all these diverse venues,” Spio explains, referring to the Tanzanian Afrobeats performer whose act involves an encounter with zebras and lions. You could be in a safari, surrounded by actual animals, enjoying a Diamond Platnumz show.”
According to Spio, the combination of images and sounds is crucial. “It’s as if we’re saturating you with sound, and you can sense everything.” Ceek’s VR strategy includes $250 custom-branded headphones and a $99 custom VR headgear with a three-month subscription to Ceek’s service.
If you don’t want to spend the money on both, you can view the full-360 scenes on your smartphone. The subscription, which includes content from Diamond Platnumz and Sarkodie, costs $10 per month. It’s amazing to think that for as little as $10, One could relive about New Year’s Eve in Independence Square using Ceek on my smartphone.
Attendees can also use Ceek to test their preconceived views about a destination and plan future trips within and outside of Africa. “Mariachi music is a glimpse of Mexico for some people,” explains Spio. “However, by being in these locations and experiencing a different style of music via a different lens, one might broaden his horizon to visit a Cenote in Mexico or an EDM rave in Mexico and experience it for the first time.”
ON THE LEFT
A number of events and conferences have needed better, more interesting methods to go virtual in the last year and a half, and Venu3D is a VR platform that wants to help. The goal of this tool, which was created to assist event organizers in hosting trade exhibitions, congresses, and conferences, is to make distant guests feel like they are actually at the event while remaining safely remote. “Our Covid Relief Tradeshow in March had over 800 attendees and over 135 exhibitors,” says Jeremy Lam, CEO of Venu3D, of the event, which drew virtual attendees from the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, and Kenya, among other places.
The Covid Relief Tradeshow was free to all members of the Young Presidents Organization, which hosted it.
Other groups provide it for free to all participants and use Venu3D features to prominently display event sponsors. Ticket prices, on the other hand, often range from $50 to $500. Venu3D events are open to anyone who attends their free meetups.
Venu3D’s audio, like Ceek’s, may be accessed with or without a headset. Participants may hear individuals in the virtual world based on their proximity and visit virtual art exhibits, all in an attempt to mimic the experience of being in a room with real people you can engage with. “When I first saw the platform, I imagined a day when VR will be widely adopted,” says the excited narrator.
VR TO THE FUTURE
The promise of virtual reality is that it can help us reimagine what it means to travel. According to David Askaryan, CEO of the Museum of Future Experiences, “traveling may mean spanning cultures, traversing memories, and it can also be extremely internal.”
MOFE’s VR venue and production studio, according to Askaryan, provide “an experience where the environment around you entirely changes for 70 minutes.”
MOFE is more of a curated art studio that offers events than a traditional “museum.” Liminality, the current show, invites viewers to consider the future. Liminality’s Life Giver, which costs $75 in New York, transports viewers to a dystopian, post-apocalyptic Sweden where a family navigates the impact of of global warming.
“The exhibition is conceived as a dream or a surreal journey to promote contemplation, interpretation, and discussion,” adds Askaryan. The company intends to expand to more cities in the near future.
These types of shows are just the beginning. Scent libraries, taste electrodes, and an already-available array of haptic-feedback gloves and other apparel will eventually be used by travel companies and other art and experience “factories” to stimulate all five senses for even more completely immersive experiences. There may come a time when I can gain even more benefits from using virtual reality to deal with the next pandemic-level threat.
In the future, we envision a world where everyone may travel to Africa via virtual reality. Putting on the headphone and on a tour to Tawala Beach in Accra from a Chicago bedroom. With the feet feeling grainy sand and the sun’s unmistakable warm, penetrating glow while on the move. Tasting the sweetness of coconut pulp when walking past a kube wura (coconut vendor) on the street. With a taste of salt on the tongue, conveyed by the Atlantic breeze. Staring at the waves and listening to the water slowly crashing into the body and receding till sleep comes. It’s a journey with Virtual reality and it’s quite an experience.
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