High Tech Travel for the 21st Century
CALL FOR PAPERS
Chairs: Wolfgang BÖRNER | Austria, Eleni PANAGOU, Greece | Linda POTTER, USA
Tourist agencies are often making stunning efforts to satisfy and retain their customers when planning complete and sound travel packages. The modern tourist is likely to be at least moderately tech-savvy, and, thus, expectations are higher regarding how cultural heritage sites are presented to them. Gone are the days of 2-page brochures or earphone guides giving condensed historic descriptions of what they are visiting. 21st century tourists expect to be amazed by their experience at these sites. Such innovations as three-dimensional projections which place the tourist in the midst of the everyday lives of the original inhabitants of these sites have been used to enliven the experience.
Museologists, archaeologists and other creative industries’ scientists have chosen to reveal the cultural value of archaeological sites and artifacts in an enriched, yet scientifically documented, form. New Technologies and their methods of scanning and obtaining high- tech digital data with the purpose of narrating and storytelling can aid in reinforcing thematic tourism packages. This might be achieved through:
1. New methods for the documentation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage assets,
2. New Virtual Reality (VR) techniques that became popular either in desktop or in mobile platforms,
3. New Evaluation Platforms for sensing Visitor’s needs, learning experience and their affective behaviors with museums, sites, landscapes, destinations and routes,
4. Innovative affective and visiting learning experiences that highlight the need for adopting New Technologies for the protection and documentation of Cultural Heritage World Goods.
We invite archaeologists, Cultural Heritage managers, museologists, creative industries scientists and tourism operators to submit papers proposing ways in which new technologies can be effective tools in enhancing tourism at cultural sites. We want to emphasize through this call, the difficulties of making the traveller’s visit a unique experience yet with multi- factorial results.