An Innovative Way of Guided Tour: A Virtual Experience of Dark Tourism

More and more wearable devices are applied to the tourism industry, laying the foundation for critical discussions on the technological mediation of tourism experience. Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the most promising tools for the tourism industry since the big breakthrough in 2014 and many consumer-grade headsets becoming available in 2016. It let us can virtually visit a place via VR goggles. Dark tourism destinations such as Pompeii, Berlin Wall, 911 Memorial attracted a large number of visitors every year. However, the dark sites sometimes are connected with the massacre or war, thus also named “Difficult Heritage” or “Traumascapes”. The aim of this study is to inspire a new idea of promotion that introduced the Taiwan dark tourism through the augmented VR experience. GoPro Hero 4 six-camera set, Kolor Autopano Giga and Panotour Pro software, and the web platform Holobuilder were applied in this experiment. 228 Memorials and Parks were chosen as the dark tour destinations. Visitors can just use their mobile phone to scan the QR code, and put on the VR goggles. They immerse in the virtual tour with 360-degree panoramas video, interactive audio guiding, and tour self-paced from one destination to another destination.