Spatial computing will redefine tourism by blending digital and physical experiences. Destinations must adapt now for future innovation.
We've been exploring the transformative potential of emerging technologies in tourism for over a decade. Yet, even against this backdrop of continuous innovation, we believe spatial computing represents something fundamentally different that could redefine how we think about digital experiences in tourism. As we launch our XR Impact Programme, we want to take a deep dive into what spatial computing means for our industry and why destinations need to start thinking seriously about its implications.
To understand why spatial computing matters for tourism, we first need to grasp what makes it fundamentally different from previous technological advances. Traditional computing has always maintained a clear boundary between the digital and physical worlds — we interact with digital content through screens, keyboards and other discrete interfaces. Spatial computing dissolves these boundaries, allowing digital content to exist alongside the physical world, enabling interactivity in a way that feels natural and intuitive.
Think of it this way: when a visitor uses their smartphone to navigate a city, they're constantly switching between their surroundings and the digital map on their screen. With spatial computing, navigation could become a seamless experience where directional arrows appear to float in the street, historical buildings reveal their stories through immersive overlays and even lesser-known attractions could announce their presence through subtle visual cues integrated into the visitor's field of view.
What makes spatial computing particularly relevant for tourism is how it builds on three fundamental capabilities that align perfectly with the needs of our industry, each offering both immediate practical applications and transformative strategic possibilities:
Environmental understanding represents perhaps the most profound shift in how we can approach destination management and development. This capability goes beyond simple location awareness, enabling devices to create detailed, real-time spatial models of physical environments, understanding everything from architectural features to crowd flows and environmental conditions. This opens up two parallel paths of opportunity for destinations: immediate visitor experience enhancement and strategic planning transformation.
On the visitor-facing side, environmental understanding enables sophisticated way-finding that adapts not just to the location but to the visitor's interests, mobility needs and real-time conditions. A family with young children might be guided along routes with rest areas and family-friendly attractions, while culture enthusiasts could be directed through historical quarters with rich storytelling opportunities. But the more revolutionary application lies in destination management and development. By creating detailed digital twins of spaces, destinations can run sophisticated simulations to test assumptions and strategies. For example, spatial computing could facilitate the visualisation and analysis of how a new festival layout might affect crowd management and improve visitor dispersal. These capabilities transform abstract planning discussions into tangible, visual scenarios that stakeholders can literally walk through and evaluate.
Natural interaction capabilities fundamentally reshape how visitors engage with destination content, moving us from passive consumption to active exploration. Through intuitive gestures, eye movements and voice commands, visitors can interact with digital content as naturally as they would with physical objects. While the immediate application might be allowing visitors to "handle" digital recreations of historical artefacts or reveal layers of information about cultural sites, the strategic implications run deeper. This natural interaction enables "embodied learning", where visitors can physically engage with destination content in ways that create deeper, more memorable connections. This might transform pre-visit engagement, whereby potential visitors don't just view but physically participate in spatial destination content experiences, from horse rides through dramatic landscapes to traditional craft demonstrations, creating powerful emotional connections before they even arrive.
Persistent spatial anchoring is another rich development which is unique to spatial computing, allowing digital content to maintain fixed relationships with physical spaces. While the immediate benefit is the ability to overlay interpretive content onto locations without physical infrastructure, the strategic implications are far more interesting. This technology enables destinations to create multiple parallel narrative layers that can be activated based on visitor interests, time of day or special events. This would allow a historic square, for example, to host different digital experiences for different audiences. As such, through the addition of diversified experiences, spatial computing may even add an extra reason for visitors to return or create synergies between different groups of visitors.
The practical implementation of these capabilities might seem daunting, but many opportunities are more accessible than they appear. Spatial video capture, for instance, is already within reach for destinations working with skilled videographers equipped with the right tools. Similarly, existing destination apps can be upgraded to incorporate spatial features incrementally. The key is identifying quick wins, where relatively modest investments in spatial computing capabilities can deliver significant results, with potentially far-reaching implications to the visitor experience or destination management processes for those willing to invest early and think highly strategically.
The three technological foundations of spatial computing converge to design entirely new tourism experiences. As we move from theoretical capabilities to practical applications, we see these foundations enabling transformative changes across the entire visitor journey.
Pre-visit engagement represents perhaps the most immediate opportunity for destinations to leverage spatial computing's capabilities. The technology fundamentally disrupts established destination research and trip planning processes by introducing "embodied discovery". Unlike traditional digital content consumption, where potential visitors passively absorb curated imagery and information, spatial computing enables a form of pre-visit exploration that mirrors natural environmental learning processes. Through devices like Apple's Vision Pro, visitors can engage in proprioceptive exploration of spatially-anchored destination content, a profound shift from abstract information gathering to embodied understanding. This transformation extends far beyond simple virtual reality experiences. When combined with the three foundational pillars, pre-visit engagement becomes an entirely new modality of place-based content interaction.
The implications for destination marketing in this context become particularly fascinating. How do you design marketing materials for a medium where visitors can literally walk around inside your content? What does it mean when your marketing assets need to be spatially correct and interactive rather than simply visually appealing? These questions challenge our fundamental assumptions about destination marketing and require us to rethink not just our content creation processes, but our entire approach to engaging visitors before their trip.
The convergence of spatial computing's capabilities creates equally transformative possibilities for in-destination experiences. We're witnessing the emergence of what might be termed "dynamic spatial narratives", where physical spaces become fluid, multi-layered storytelling environments that respond to and evolve with each visitor's presence. This represents a profound shift from traditional interpretive approaches, which typically present static narratives within fixed physical contexts.
Enabling "temporal elasticity" in destination experiences — the ability to seamlessly traverse different periods while maintaining spatial coherence — raises complex questions about authenticity and narrative authority. When every physical space can potentially contain infinite layers of digital interpretation, who curates these layers and in what situations is such heavy content investment warranted or considered worthwhile for the destination experience?
The potential is incredible, but the challenges, while not insurmountable, certainly cannot be ignored, especially for those with antiquated strategic approaches towards committing resources to such digital content experiences for which the return on investment may be more challenging to evaluate.
Before diving into practical considerations, it's important to understand how spatial computing operates across three interconnected layers. The physical layer forms the foundation - the actual tourist sites, buildings, and spaces where experiences take place. Building upon this, the digital layer comprises the spatial mapping data and anchor points that enable precise positioning of virtual content in physical space. Finally, the system layer orchestrates everything - managing content delivery, processing user interactions, and ensuring real-time response to visitor engagement. Understanding these layers is crucial as each presents unique challenges and opportunities for destinations.
The transformation of tourism experiences through spatial computing requires careful consideration of both technical requirements and strategic implications. Content creation represents the most immediate challenge. Spatial computing demands fundamentally different types of digital assets than traditional marketing materials or interpretive content. Beyond simple 3D models or virtual environments, destinations must consider how to create truly spatial experiences that leverage all three pillars of the technology. This requires new skills, new workflows and new ways of thinking.
The infrastructure requirements extend beyond the capabilities of individual devices like the Vision Pro. While these devices handle much of the computational heavy lifting, destinations must consider the broader ecosystem needed to support spatial computing experiences. This includes precise spatial mapping of key sites, digital anchoring points and development of robust systems for managing and delivering spatial content. The creation of digital twins for key attractions or entire districts requires significant investment but opens up unprecedented possibilities for both visitor experience enhancement and destination management.
Accessibility and inclusion present another crucial consideration. As with any new technology, there's a risk of creating or exacerbating digital divides. How do we ensure that spatial computing enhances rather than replaces traditional ways of experiencing a destination? This question becomes particularly important when we consider that spatial computing experiences might actually provide superior access or understanding in some contexts, which for places which are inaccessible or have a delicate environmental balance could be seen as a positive factor, but for others the concern of replacing real experiences is legitimate.
Before diving into practical considerations, it's important to understand how spatial computing operates across three interconnected layers. The physical layer forms the foundation - the actual visitor attractions, buildings, and spaces where experiences take place. Building upon this, the digital layer comprises the spatial mapping data and anchor points that enable precise positioning of virtual content in physical space. Finally, the system layer orchestrates everything - managing content delivery, processing user interactions, and ensuring real-time response to visitor engagement. Understanding these layers is crucial as each presents unique challenges and opportunities for destinations.
At the Digital Tourism Think Tank, we believe destinations need to start preparing for spatial computing now, even if widespread adoption is still a few years away. Through our XR Impact Programme, beginning with our first in-person workshop this June at X. Design Week, we're working to help destinations understand and prepare for this future. This preparation involves rethinking how we approach experience design in an era where digital and physical realities seamlessly blend and then focusing on the specific devices needed to achieve strategic objectives.
Success in spatial computing won't just be about using or being present within the latest technology; it will come from fully understanding how to use these new capabilities to enhance the fundamental human experiences that make destinations meaningful to build lasting connections with visitors. This requires DMOs to:
The next five years will be crucial in determining how spatial computing develops within tourism. The launch of devices like the Apple Vision Pro represents just the beginning. What matters now is how we as an industry choose to apply these technologies to create meaningful visitor experiences. Our XR Impact Programme aims to help destinations navigate this transformation, ensuring that technological innovation serves the fundamental goal of creating more meaningful, accessible and sustainable tourism experiences.
We've been exploring the transformative potential of emerging technologies in tourism for over a decade. Yet, even against this backdrop of continuous innovation, we believe spatial computing represents something fundamentally different that could redefine how we think about digital experiences in tourism. As we launch our XR Impact Programme, we want to take a deep dive into what spatial computing means for our industry and why destinations need to start thinking seriously about its implications.
To understand why spatial computing matters for tourism, we first need to grasp what makes it fundamentally different from previous technological advances. Traditional computing has always maintained a clear boundary between the digital and physical worlds — we interact with digital content through screens, keyboards and other discrete interfaces. Spatial computing dissolves these boundaries, allowing digital content to exist alongside the physical world, enabling interactivity in a way that feels natural and intuitive.
Think of it this way: when a visitor uses their smartphone to navigate a city, they're constantly switching between their surroundings and the digital map on their screen. With spatial computing, navigation could become a seamless experience where directional arrows appear to float in the street, historical buildings reveal their stories through immersive overlays and even lesser-known attractions could announce their presence through subtle visual cues integrated into the visitor's field of view.
What makes spatial computing particularly relevant for tourism is how it builds on three fundamental capabilities that align perfectly with the needs of our industry, each offering both immediate practical applications and transformative strategic possibilities:
Environmental understanding represents perhaps the most profound shift in how we can approach destination management and development. This capability goes beyond simple location awareness, enabling devices to create detailed, real-time spatial models of physical environments, understanding everything from architectural features to crowd flows and environmental conditions. This opens up two parallel paths of opportunity for destinations: immediate visitor experience enhancement and strategic planning transformation.
On the visitor-facing side, environmental understanding enables sophisticated way-finding that adapts not just to the location but to the visitor's interests, mobility needs and real-time conditions. A family with young children might be guided along routes with rest areas and family-friendly attractions, while culture enthusiasts could be directed through historical quarters with rich storytelling opportunities. But the more revolutionary application lies in destination management and development. By creating detailed digital twins of spaces, destinations can run sophisticated simulations to test assumptions and strategies. For example, spatial computing could facilitate the visualisation and analysis of how a new festival layout might affect crowd management and improve visitor dispersal. These capabilities transform abstract planning discussions into tangible, visual scenarios that stakeholders can literally walk through and evaluate.
Natural interaction capabilities fundamentally reshape how visitors engage with destination content, moving us from passive consumption to active exploration. Through intuitive gestures, eye movements and voice commands, visitors can interact with digital content as naturally as they would with physical objects. While the immediate application might be allowing visitors to "handle" digital recreations of historical artefacts or reveal layers of information about cultural sites, the strategic implications run deeper. This natural interaction enables "embodied learning", where visitors can physically engage with destination content in ways that create deeper, more memorable connections. This might transform pre-visit engagement, whereby potential visitors don't just view but physically participate in spatial destination content experiences, from horse rides through dramatic landscapes to traditional craft demonstrations, creating powerful emotional connections before they even arrive.
Persistent spatial anchoring is another rich development which is unique to spatial computing, allowing digital content to maintain fixed relationships with physical spaces. While the immediate benefit is the ability to overlay interpretive content onto locations without physical infrastructure, the strategic implications are far more interesting. This technology enables destinations to create multiple parallel narrative layers that can be activated based on visitor interests, time of day or special events. This would allow a historic square, for example, to host different digital experiences for different audiences. As such, through the addition of diversified experiences, spatial computing may even add an extra reason for visitors to return or create synergies between different groups of visitors.
The practical implementation of these capabilities might seem daunting, but many opportunities are more accessible than they appear. Spatial video capture, for instance, is already within reach for destinations working with skilled videographers equipped with the right tools. Similarly, existing destination apps can be upgraded to incorporate spatial features incrementally. The key is identifying quick wins, where relatively modest investments in spatial computing capabilities can deliver significant results, with potentially far-reaching implications to the visitor experience or destination management processes for those willing to invest early and think highly strategically.
The three technological foundations of spatial computing converge to design entirely new tourism experiences. As we move from theoretical capabilities to practical applications, we see these foundations enabling transformative changes across the entire visitor journey.
Pre-visit engagement represents perhaps the most immediate opportunity for destinations to leverage spatial computing's capabilities. The technology fundamentally disrupts established destination research and trip planning processes by introducing "embodied discovery". Unlike traditional digital content consumption, where potential visitors passively absorb curated imagery and information, spatial computing enables a form of pre-visit exploration that mirrors natural environmental learning processes. Through devices like Apple's Vision Pro, visitors can engage in proprioceptive exploration of spatially-anchored destination content, a profound shift from abstract information gathering to embodied understanding. This transformation extends far beyond simple virtual reality experiences. When combined with the three foundational pillars, pre-visit engagement becomes an entirely new modality of place-based content interaction.
The implications for destination marketing in this context become particularly fascinating. How do you design marketing materials for a medium where visitors can literally walk around inside your content? What does it mean when your marketing assets need to be spatially correct and interactive rather than simply visually appealing? These questions challenge our fundamental assumptions about destination marketing and require us to rethink not just our content creation processes, but our entire approach to engaging visitors before their trip.
The convergence of spatial computing's capabilities creates equally transformative possibilities for in-destination experiences. We're witnessing the emergence of what might be termed "dynamic spatial narratives", where physical spaces become fluid, multi-layered storytelling environments that respond to and evolve with each visitor's presence. This represents a profound shift from traditional interpretive approaches, which typically present static narratives within fixed physical contexts.
Enabling "temporal elasticity" in destination experiences — the ability to seamlessly traverse different periods while maintaining spatial coherence — raises complex questions about authenticity and narrative authority. When every physical space can potentially contain infinite layers of digital interpretation, who curates these layers and in what situations is such heavy content investment warranted or considered worthwhile for the destination experience?
The potential is incredible, but the challenges, while not insurmountable, certainly cannot be ignored, especially for those with antiquated strategic approaches towards committing resources to such digital content experiences for which the return on investment may be more challenging to evaluate.
Before diving into practical considerations, it's important to understand how spatial computing operates across three interconnected layers. The physical layer forms the foundation - the actual tourist sites, buildings, and spaces where experiences take place. Building upon this, the digital layer comprises the spatial mapping data and anchor points that enable precise positioning of virtual content in physical space. Finally, the system layer orchestrates everything - managing content delivery, processing user interactions, and ensuring real-time response to visitor engagement. Understanding these layers is crucial as each presents unique challenges and opportunities for destinations.
The transformation of tourism experiences through spatial computing requires careful consideration of both technical requirements and strategic implications. Content creation represents the most immediate challenge. Spatial computing demands fundamentally different types of digital assets than traditional marketing materials or interpretive content. Beyond simple 3D models or virtual environments, destinations must consider how to create truly spatial experiences that leverage all three pillars of the technology. This requires new skills, new workflows and new ways of thinking.
The infrastructure requirements extend beyond the capabilities of individual devices like the Vision Pro. While these devices handle much of the computational heavy lifting, destinations must consider the broader ecosystem needed to support spatial computing experiences. This includes precise spatial mapping of key sites, digital anchoring points and development of robust systems for managing and delivering spatial content. The creation of digital twins for key attractions or entire districts requires significant investment but opens up unprecedented possibilities for both visitor experience enhancement and destination management.
Accessibility and inclusion present another crucial consideration. As with any new technology, there's a risk of creating or exacerbating digital divides. How do we ensure that spatial computing enhances rather than replaces traditional ways of experiencing a destination? This question becomes particularly important when we consider that spatial computing experiences might actually provide superior access or understanding in some contexts, which for places which are inaccessible or have a delicate environmental balance could be seen as a positive factor, but for others the concern of replacing real experiences is legitimate.
Before diving into practical considerations, it's important to understand how spatial computing operates across three interconnected layers. The physical layer forms the foundation - the actual visitor attractions, buildings, and spaces where experiences take place. Building upon this, the digital layer comprises the spatial mapping data and anchor points that enable precise positioning of virtual content in physical space. Finally, the system layer orchestrates everything - managing content delivery, processing user interactions, and ensuring real-time response to visitor engagement. Understanding these layers is crucial as each presents unique challenges and opportunities for destinations.
At the Digital Tourism Think Tank, we believe destinations need to start preparing for spatial computing now, even if widespread adoption is still a few years away. Through our XR Impact Programme, beginning with our first in-person workshop this June at X. Design Week, we're working to help destinations understand and prepare for this future. This preparation involves rethinking how we approach experience design in an era where digital and physical realities seamlessly blend and then focusing on the specific devices needed to achieve strategic objectives.
Success in spatial computing won't just be about using or being present within the latest technology; it will come from fully understanding how to use these new capabilities to enhance the fundamental human experiences that make destinations meaningful to build lasting connections with visitors. This requires DMOs to:
The next five years will be crucial in determining how spatial computing develops within tourism. The launch of devices like the Apple Vision Pro represents just the beginning. What matters now is how we as an industry choose to apply these technologies to create meaningful visitor experiences. Our XR Impact Programme aims to help destinations navigate this transformation, ensuring that technological innovation serves the fundamental goal of creating more meaningful, accessible and sustainable tourism experiences.
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