Keywords

Why Digital Travel?

The history of travel goes hand in hand with the history of humanity. Travel and tourism are many-faceted, and can be studied using methods from many research traditions. Very few researchers, or people in general, use the terms digital travel or virtual travel, even though conditions in our societies differ significantly from the recent past. Understanding what these terms mean needs to draw on a range of contexts and research traditions, which is what we have attempted to do in this book. In tourism research, for example, the focus is often on the experience, what travellers do and where they go (the destinations of travel). Telepresence research, a relatively new research area, often concerns how to understand why we have a feeling of being there, in a virtual place, and how to measure this experience, but this has not often been framed as digital travel.

People increasingly travel, visit and meet other people digitally in computer-mediated environments. The covid-19 pandemic, and the restrictions on physical meetings and travel that have come with it, has resulted in an enormous change in behaviour and attitudes towards the practicality and acceptability of replacing physical encounters with virtual ones. Prior to this, videoconferencing and other technologies were already used in business and as a way for families and friends to keep in touch over distances. Recent developments have led to many other kinds of meetings and events taking place without physical travel; for example, concerts, school and college classes, sports events, academic and other conferences, training and personal development courses and medical consultations.

Many computer games use realistically presented (distant) places as the venue for action. These may be fictional, but are often digital versions of actual physical places, such as museums, famous localities, sports stadiums, motor racetracks, cities and so on. In these and other virtual environments, the visitor may explore and sightsee in ways that are somewhat analogous to being a tourist in a physical location. But there are significant differences between being a virtual tourist and physically travelling for pleasure to places people live and work, as a tourist traditionally does.

To travel to a particular place at a particular time has always been important for people. When physical travel to a specific place is prohibited or otherwise difficult or impossible, virtual travel provides a promising alternative. If we cannot go to an event and meet our friends, colleagues or new acquaintances there, we can still meet via a teleconference system, in a virtual room. The technology to do this is now widely available and many people have the possibility to meet with others in virtuality, and so overcome—or at least alleviate—the social effects of physical isolation, which is known to be detrimental to both physical and mental wellbeing. But despite the recent upsurge in virtual social interaction, many people feel that they are missing something important—the travel experience, visiting places and meeting people face to face. And there is evidence that such virtual interactions can be stressful and more tiring than their physical counterparts.

The experience of physical place is also undergoing profound changes, through the widespread adoption of mobile technology and, in particular, the almost universal use of mobile phones. The way mobile phones are used has been compared to a snail carrying its home on its back. Being able to attend to the phone, and via the phone to distant people and places, can provide a “home” into which we can retreat or return. Wherever we are, however socially dull or difficult that place may be, we can always take out our phone and “escape”. A recent study (Miller et al., 2021) found that users across many age groups feel about their phones in analogous ways to how they about their homes. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper (Guardian, May 13, 2021) one of the authors, Daniel Miller commented that “The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it’s become the place where we live. The flip side of that for human relationships is that at any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone”. The possibility to mentally leave one’s current social situation is referred to in the study as the “death of proximity” in face-to-face interactions. These developments can be seen as making the difference between physical and digital travel less striking.

Meetings between people increasingly take place in virtual spaces, via teleconferencing systems such as Zoom, Teams and Skype. But these meetings do not always satisfy the needs of the attendees, and may lead to fatigue, to some extent by violating social interaction norms. For example, in a typical working configuration at home, with a personal computer with embedded camera, the people with which we meet may appear too close for comfort, and we are also not used to seeing ourselves during meetings in a way that may make us overly self-conscious (Bailenson, 2021).

Meyrowitz (1986) made the case that modern communication media lack the sense of place that frames the social behaviours of the people interacting within and through them. In these environments, people have what seem to be face-to-face encounters, and yet they are not, since the participants are in different physical places and do not share the real experience of being in the same place. Meyrowitz’ vision was prescient, and speaks directly to our intensely and increasingly media-networked relationships. We have “friends” on Facebook, for example, with people we have never physically met, never shared the experience of an actual place with. We meet them, but our meetings lack something vital to human encounters—a real sense of travel to actual places. Relph (2021) talks about widespread “digital disorientation” produced by the characteristics of participatory and globally networked communication media. As he comments: “The arduous and abrasive situations, discordance, speeding up, and phantasmagoric mixing of cultural memories that are symptoms of digital disorientation flourish in this quintessentially placeless environment”. (Relph, 2021, p. 574). And this disorientation is not limited to digital interactions. Relph (2021) goes on to suggest that “because participants in the web are also inhabitants of the material world, these disruptions can come back to invade experiences of actual places”. Physical places are altered by digital encounters in cyberspace, a point to which we return in later chapters.

The Mind of the Digital Traveller

In his book on travel, The Mind of the Traveler (Leed, 1991) Eric Leed identifies and provides historical, sociological and psychological insights about the different elements that together combine to form a journey, carried out by a traveller. A journey consists of departure, passage and arrival; each has its own characteristics and significance. Departure is not only about leaving a place, no longer being there, but also involves a change in the psyche, in the self. The traveller not only leaves a place, he leaves a part of his identity by adopting another. For a few, the passage from one place to another is an end in itself—the reason for travelling is not to arrive somewhere, but to be in transit. But for most travellers, the passage marks a process of transition, personal as well as physical, from one place to another. It may be slow or fast, comfortable or arduous, safe or hazardous, but it is always a process, a change marked by its own character and imprinted on the traveller. In an arrival, the traveller is either a stranger, or is coming home from a strange, a different, place. Arriving is often risky: how does this place work? Will I be accepted? Have things changed since last I was here? How should I behave?

Tourism scholars have extensively discussed the question of why people travel and the tourist experience. Many scholars and authors have contributed to our understanding of travel, holidays and leisure activities and to see tourism as “a temporary reversal of everyday activities”, as expressed by Cohen (1979), who identified several different modes of tourism experience (to which we return later in Chapter 4). Tourism can be characterised as a “home-away-back-home’’ journey. The nature of tourism is that it involves both a going out, from home, and a return to home. Nowadays, tourism is a huge industry, with broad economic impact on countries around the world. But, more importantly, it has become a part of the personal life of most people. A tourist has a desire to visit places and to visually appreciate sights. The essence of tourism is visual consumption, “the tourist gaze” (Urry, 1990, 1992a, 1992b). It is often mediated through a camera; still photographic images or videos. The tourist then views the world at a distance and, at its extreme, travel is a strategy for the accumulation of photographs (Urry, 1990: 139) to be viewed and shared, or just filed away. The notion of the tourist gaze emphasises a person’s mental distance from a remote place. “The post-tourist knows that they are a tourist and that tourism is a game, or rather a whole series of games with multiple texts and no single, authentic tourist experience” (Urry, 1990: 100; cf. Turner et al., 2005). Urry emphasises the visual; tourists visit “sights” and enjoy seeing places.

Virtual tourism and VR for tourism can be traced back to the early 1990s (Bauer and Jacobsen, 1995; Benjamin & Cooper, 1995; Cheong, 1995; Dewailly, 1999; Williams & Hobson, 1995). In the 1990s, research on virtual tourism was primarily conducted by IT-researchers and it was anticipated that virtual tourism would become a mainstream knowledge domain for adoption by the tourism industry. We are not there yet. Some also investigated the relationship between virtual tourism and actual travelling, seeing the former as a potential marketing tool.

Fencott (1999) and Fencott et al. (2003) argued that the longer visitors linger overall in a virtual tourism environment, the more likely they are to find the virtual experience memorable and perhaps retain the desire to actually visit the place the VE is modelling. Williams (2006) discusses how technology can produce virtual visits, and some implications for tourism of a virtual visit. Losh (2006) describes how the serious game Virtual Iraq can be used to trigger memories and stimulate coping mechanisms in combat veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an example of a wide range of similar work capitalising on the psychotherapeutic potential of VR. This potential is presumably based on similarities between experiencing the VR and experiencing the actual situation in physical reality. Widyarto and Latiff (2007) emphasise that a virtual application works well in a travel context as a tool for getting to know the place and navigation purposes, but they also argued that it cannot replace the real-world experience.

It might be that a tourist does not accept a virtual substitute, but exposure to the virtual place may nevertheless increase their desire to visit the actual place (Dewailly, 1999). According to Beck et al. (2019) there are studies that suggest that VR, regardless of whether it is non-, semi- or fully immersive, is capable of positively influencing an individual’s motivation to actually visit a place. According to Plunkett (2011) a virtual experience can create an attachment to a place, and this may not be to the place as displayed on the screen, but to the physical place it represents. Tourism is, for good reasons, of interest to telepresence research because the tourist experience is a multisensory experience (Rickly-Boyd, 2009) and because the “there” in being there (a characterisation of telepresence) can be a tourist destination.

The “there” in the being there of telepresence and the “there” of actually visiting and experiencing a place in travel and tourism is a red thread running through the structure of this book. Each chapter addresses both perspectives; physical being and virtual being. In telepresence the “being there” is in most cases relatively short or “in the moment”, while physical travel and tourist experiences are longer and do not evaporate when we have breaks in presence—a sudden glitch, power outage or simply turning off the device we are using.

In situ, for instance, as a tourist at holiday destination, we do not think about whether where we are is real or not. But when we play a digital game, this factor has an effect. Schwartz (2006) argues that realism and attention to detail allow gamers to experience game spaces as real. As an example, he quotes a player of the video game Grand Theft Auto: “You feel as if you’re in a real town/city with other people” (p. 315). From observations such as this, it can be inferred that some gamers visit and explore a game space in a manner similar to tourists exploring a physical space. Schwartz concludes that video game environments afford the blending of fantasy and realistic aspects into a believable, attractive place for players to visit.

In his review article on virtual tourism, Guttentag (2010) discusses many aspects of relevance for the tourism industry. He observes that virtual tours are often panoramic photographs that do not permit any free navigation, meaning that they are not what he describes as genuine VR—explorable 3D spaces (Guttentag, 2010). Surprisingly, there seems to be very little overlap between the telepresence literature and the virtual tourism literature (Yung & Khoo-Lattimore, 2019). Guttentag (2010) cites only three papers from the two leading journals on telepresence; two papers from Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments and one paper from Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking. This indicates that very few tourism researchers have built on telepresence research. There is one noticeable exception; the authors of the publications from the Benogo project explicitly link tourism and telepresence (Turner et al., 2013), and human geography to experiences in VEs (O’Neill, 2005; Benyon et al., 2006; Turner & Turner, 2006; Turner et al., 2005). This is in line with the mission of the project; Benogo stands for “Be there without going there”. Clearly, virtual tourism is related to telepresence since both concern the feeling of being there.

The telepresence researcher Mel Slater does not discuss tourism per se, but emphasises the idea of place in being there. He writes: “this ‘experiencing-as-a-place’ is very much what I have tried to convey as a meaning of presence in VEs: people are ‘there’, they respond to what is ‘there’, and they remember it as a ‘place’” (Slater, 1999: 562). In a more recent paper, Slater and Sanchez-Vives (2016) discuss virtual travel with reference to Cheong’s (1995) visions for virtual tourism in the mid-1990s. They conclude the section by writing (p. 27); “Perhaps, VR is not meant to be a substitute for real travel but just another form of travel, no less valid in its own terms than all that physically boarding the real aeroplane entails”.

A study by Lombard and Weinstein (2012) has a quote from a person who filled in the Telepresence Experience Survey, a survey instrument designed to let the participants use their own words to describe different types of (tele)presence experience. One of the participants wrote “I completely felt that I was a part of the world and the characters and settings were all real and places I have been”, (p. 6). The quote indicates that the person had a strong virtual tourism experience.

In tourism research some refer to the telepresence concept, but there remains a dearth of empirical work, including using ways of measuring telepresence. Gretzel (2011: 758) observes that while science and technology studies have permeated other fields, it is absent from mainstream tourism literature. One of the aims in the book is to correct this lack in the literature.

In what follows, we take a fresh look at the nature of the telepresence experience in digital environments, at a time when more and more people are engaged in meetings and other interactive experiences within virtual environments (VEs) of one kind or another. We also address a number of relevant questions, such as whether these experiences can seem real to the virtual traveller and, if so, under what conditions and on what grounds? And more generally to what extent can technology be designed to make up for the needs that physical travel fills, in light of findings on physical and social presence in virtual environments?

Can a “home-away-back-home” metaphor derived from tourism be usefully applied to virtual travel, for example? Can virtual spaces become true social places that satisfy the requirements for host–guest interactions, and become fulfilling destinations for travel? We know that interactive technology can be used to create a convincing fantasy world, and also to replicate a place that actually exists. If a VR environment replicates a place that a person can visit, what experience is created and how can we understand it? This is an underlying theme in the book and is directly related to our choice for discussion of theories and findings from a range of fields, including philosophy, psychology and social science, telepresence research, human geography and tourism studies.

A Roadmap for the Book

Having outlined and briefly discussed relevant concepts related to virtual spaces and digital travel in this chapter, we move on to consider in more detail the feeling of “being there” for the quality and success of virtual social interactions and travels to distant (or fictional) places. We start in Chapter 2 by examining what is known about the sense of being somewhere, using arguments based on relevant theories of embodiment, perception, action and social behaviour. We think this largely philosophical overview is helpful in understanding the material to be covered later, especially with regard to presence, perceptual illusions and being in places. Readers not wishing to go so deeply into these aspects may prefer to take a shortcut to Chapter 3 and beyond.

In Chapter 3, we compare and contrast different current theoretical accounts of telepresence, in the light of their plausibility and implications for understanding in what ways people can experience a sense of being in other places, with other people, using digital technology; how, through digital technology, we can have a sense of being somewhere else.

Next, in Chapter 4, we examine different notions of place, as outlined in work in tourism studies and other applied social fields; how and when different experiences of place arise for the traveller, and the distinction between spaces and places and their respective characteristics and roles in social interactions. We also look closely at a neglected topic in the literature: How do telepresence and the sense of place relate to each other?

Chapter 5 summarises and interprets findings from two sets of recent empirical studies of the authors on digital travel. The first was on factors affecting the sense of place experience, and telepresence, using video games to create a sightseeing environment for participants. The second was a survey of a broad sample of citizens on their attitudes to vacation planning and digital travel applications used before, during and after visiting a tourist destination. We found that some respondents expect to have digital travel experiences in the future, experiences that we can describe as digital visits to a place without travelling physically.

Chapter 6 addresses the question of how we can design for virtual travel and meetings, so that the experience is more satisfying, and real, for participants. We selectively present current interactive design trends and possibilities for a future in which more and more travel is virtual rather than physical, in the light of the arguments and findings presented earlier in the book. For example: Is it possible to maintain key role-related aspects of behaviour in appropriately designed virtual, or mixed reality spaces? What would this entail? Can the physical and the virtual be blended to support embodied interaction in integrated places that span distant boundaries? If such places can become real for the participants, not only in the moment, but as lasting, memorable experiences of being there, real virtual travel could then replace the currently disjointed social interactions through the Internet that have become so familiar.

We complete our journey through this book by concluding our argument that the feeling one is actually in a place—the feeling of “being there”—is vital to the quality and success of virtual social interactions and travels to distant (or fictional) places. This is especially relevant at times when travel is restricted or prohibited, since a lack of travel can mean few social opportunities, leading to a sense of isolation and sometimes depression. Currently, however, virtual travel is unlike physical travel in many significant respects, and does not adequately satisfy the socio-psychological needs of people meeting, of tourists and their hosts, or of other kinds of travellers. We draw together our conclusions and present speculations about the not-too-distant future, when digital travel may become truly real.