On 20th April, the Founder of the Virtuale gave a talk on “Digital Technology in Action: A New Era of Virtual Tourism”. The talk used the Grand Tour as a model for a rebirth of smart tourism, which on the one hand took the cultural needs of individuals and on the other hand took sustainability into account. Breaking down cultural toursin into niches, Arthur Clay was able to demonstrate the wide range of applications of AR in this area.
He furthered argued on a more philosophical note that In a time where communication technology has become a fundamental force in bringing about social-cultural change, cities and their institutes are in need of becoming more aware of and implementing means of communication and representation that dwell in the virtuale and are only accessible through the use of modern forms of information retrieval and interaction using a smart devise such as a iPhone etc.
He stated based on experiences of working with City Marketing and Cultural institutes in a wide variety of cities that the success of any city marketing (or institution representing that city, or which is part of that city’s offerings) will depend solely depend on their abilities to communicate properly to the public, who now being digital natives bred in virtual worlds come with expectations that no longer allows them to accept things that are solely real.
Example applications were shown in which museums were marketing content, and communicating to to their target audiences using digitally means . He argued that with the Virtuale, that marketing offices were able to follow suit, in accepting new ways to make site seeing experiential by adapting paradigms known and practice in electronic urban arts but which were useful as well to promote the life and culture of a city.