Virtual Tours!

There's no denying it. The world has gone virtual. Certainly with the current state of affairs now more than ever it's never been a better time to take a virtual tour of anywhere that takes your fancy (and is available). Are they any good? Yes and no, some have really put the effort in, some have just whacked a load of photos online and called it virtual. Disappointing, but you get out what you put in.

Whilst there are some truly amazing VR experiences out there, I don't actually think I've come across one yet that is completely engrossing and replaces the need to go to a place. Most are done by the ability with a single click to transport yourself to another spot, and not move around freel, interacting with each object as if you were really there. But then again, I think what I'm hoping for is an experience you'd get on the Valve Index or Oculus, something that would cost millions to develop but would probably see little return.

That being said though, one of my particular two favourite virtual tours to come out, and these are absolute doozies, are the Assassin's Creed virtual tours, also given away recently by Ubisoft for Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, two games that recreate the past as much as possible without the next best thing of hopping in a Delorean and buggering off back to the past.

These tours are the Rolls Royce standard of interactive entertainment. I remember a few years back reading about a professor that was giving his students a tour of the ancient Holy Land using the original Assassin's Creed engine to power it. That was impressive enough and Ubisoft may have nicked the idea off the fella and decided to do it themselves. And who can blame them? The gang that make the games create these magnificent engines to run these heavily detailed games in, so why not throw in a little education as well?

With education in mind, let's not shy away from just what can you learn from a virtual tour that you couldn't learn unless you went to the place. The answer is - the sense of wonder and realisation that the history steeped in these places is right there for you to see, breathe, hear and smell. Remember, the keyword here is sense. Virtual tours limit you to two or three of your senses at best, it's unfortunate but they do. You can learn a lot from them, they get you more involved if you happen to be one of the bods that has put the effort in, but they still can't replicate the sense of wonder and excitement actually visiting a place can conjure up. A shame, but the technology's just not there yet to fool all of your senses.

One day, but not today.

So, what do the virtual tour's growing industry need to do to make VR a reality that people will welcome into their homes? What could coax someone to prefer to walk around a virtual Louvre rather than have the fun and excitement of visiting the real thing? Besides saving on the expense, I think the biggest positive action these companies could do is ditch using image capture technology to create environments rendered from photos and start investing in 3D models of the areas you want to give a tour to. Sure, it's expensive, but this could be the biggest game-changer to education and entertainment since the forming of the internet.

With that investment comes time and money, but think about Minecraft, that started out small, and now you can take a tour of the entire country of Denmark in that little blocky world. We not only owe it to future generations to preserve cultural sites using technology to scan the details and recreate them in a true 3D environment, we need to do it now before it's gone.

if you check out sites like the Million Image Database https://www.millionimage.org.uk/introducing-3d/ these are bold attempts to do this, but this needs more work. Education has always been in bad need of funding because people just aren't interested in seeing the past come alive unless it's done in an entertaining fashion. That's why VR needs gaming, and gaming needs VR. They both have the need and want to do something great for the world, they can make the faraway come to our living rooms and bedrooms, they can bring the past back to life, and that's why it will be techniques used in gaming that will bring this over the finish line.

Goodnight!