Virtual Tours: Get a Feel for the “Metaverse”
Joe Casciani, PhD
Everyone loves to travel, to see new places, experience new cultures, and enjoy local cuisine. When we cannot travel, though, we do have options for virtual travel. “I may not be there in person, but I can see my choice locations, and in some platforms, hear the local street sounds.” And, as you’ll learn below, you can even interact with co-travelers. One of the early virtual tour companies was Google Earth, where you could visit virtually any spot on this planet and tour that location, with a 360-degree perspective. When visiting these sites and viewing these tours, use your mouse to rotate the view 360 degrees.
Google Earth and Google Arts and Culture
Google has sent its cars and buses around the world with 360-degree cameras to shoot these locations. Use this link to visit your desired destination: https://earth.google.com/
Beyond this feature, Google now has given us opportunities to immerse ourselves in the arts and culture scenes of over 2,000 museums and historic sites, hundreds of thousands of artworks, and over 10,000 places around the world. Visit Google Arts and Culture.
More Travel Sites
Another popular site for virtual tours is Prowalks. It hosts a collection of 4,000 videos touring popular spots. Visit the catacombs in Paris or follow a bike path along the Tiber River in Rome. Visit this site for tours: https://www.youtube.com/c/ProWalks/featured
Though largely focused on touring residential and commercial real estate sites, Matterport Gallery allows visitors to create their own 3-dimensional tours of famous buildings, exhibits, and historic homes. Or take a virtual tour of famous cathedrals. Here’s a link to their site: https://matterport.com/gallery
The virtual world is now open to all. Interested in a view from the eyes of a paraglider, soaring through the air in Chartreuse, France? How about a motorboat ride in Guangdong, China. The tour site 360 Cities offers thousands of sites – even places not on this earth, like a panorama of Mars. Hard to beat these 360-degree views. Visit https://www.360cities.net/
What is the Metaverse?
If you are not familiar with the Metaverse, it is the platform to provide an immersive experience using a virtual reality headset. Here’s a nice 90” video introduction to the Metaverse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UX0nhvgkVM
Some of you may remember an early Podcast with Kyle Rand, the CEO of Rendever. His company brings virtual reality headsets to viewers residing in senior living communities and connect remote locations through their headsets. Today, the Metaverse takes participants much further.
Meet Your Relatives at “Alcove” and Travel with Friends through “Wander”
If you have a virtual reality headset, sites like Wander and Alcove can bring you and others to the same destinations. Alcove, for example, allows you to interact with relatives, play with a virtual pet or jigsaw puzzles, and take part in health and wellness activities. Wander allows you to meet others in these travel destinations and interact with them. However, you and other participants are seen as avatars, or cartoon-like figures, due to limits in the resolution of live images. Anyone up for a virtual flight in a hot air balloon? It’s now at your doorstep.
Dr. Joe Casciani is the owner and Chief Curator for the Living to 100 Club, a source of solutions to living longer and healthier, with a special focus on mindset and attitudes about aging. He has a 40-year history as a psychologist and manager of mental health practices specializing in behavioral health services with older adults. In addition to his work as a clinical consultant, he is an engaging and inspiring speaker, and helps audiences move beyond their questions and concerns about aging to create a vision of what is possible in the years ahead. He strongly believes there is value in helping people feel inspired about their future.