How Does "Immersive Experience" Promote the Boom in Cultural Tourism Industry
"By providing immersive services, we return the 'stage' to the 'audience', so that experiencers can interact with scenarios. We will strive to create immersive cultural tourism destinations."
Tourists watch the dragon and lion dances at Jiuzhouchi scenic spot, Sui-Tang Luoyang City. [Photo via Sui-Tang Luoyang City]
In the new normal of pandemic prevention and control, the cultural tourism industry reveals certain sensitivity and vulnerability. However, recently cultural travel projects offering "immersive experience" have seen a quiet rise in popularity, becoming the next "tail wind" of the cultural tourism industry.
During this year's Lantern Festival, many tourists in Hanfu, the traditional clothing of China's Han ethnic group, held lanterns to celebrate Shangyuan Festival (or Lantern Festival) and sang songs at Ziwei Palace in the Sui and Tang Dynasty National Heritage Park in Luoyang, where they enjoyed the wonderful Tang style performance. The Shangyuan Festival special version of 3D projection show provided visitors with "sensory immersive + scenario immersive" experience of royal gardens, allowing visitors to climb the Que Towers from the thriving Tang Dynasty to enjoy the moon and lanterns. Besides, Longmen Grottoes scenic area launched "A Thousand Years of Longmen in the Golden Age of Sui and Tang", a large-scale epic immersive light show, whose magical space integrating people and scenery made tourists linger and wish not to leave.
△ [Photo by Zhang Yixi]
▽ [Photo via the Official WeChat account of Longmen Grottoes Scenic Area]
According to experts, immersive tourism is a kind of tourism achieved by technological means to meet the needs of tourists who want to be highly involved in the process of traveling and engage themselves in a richer variety of scenarios and more interesting stories. It almost covers all areas of emerging consumption in cultural tourism.
Centered on building immersive cultural tourism destinations, Luoyang with rich cultural tourism resources has proposed leveraging the new tail wind in cultural tourism development, cultivating new business patterns of cultural tourism featuring "disruptive creativity, immersive experience, and younger consumers", focusing on restoring the charm of the ancient city of Luoyang, promoting characteristic brands integrating culture and tourism, and developing a batch of immersive cultural tourism projects, to evolve itself into a new national hub of the development of immersive cultural tourism industry.
△ [Photo by Zhang Yixi]
How to grasp the new characteristics and trends of cultural and tourism consumption demand, make good use of new technologies and models, to help immersive cultural tourism industry reach a new height and achieve new breakthroughs?
We should use new technologies to explore and promote fine traditional Chinese culture and achieve creative transformation and development of traditional culture.
Meanwhile, we should also solve the problem of technology at the "peak" and content at the "mountainside". "The new tail wind in the current cultural tourism industry development is not sightseeing or performance, but immersive cultural tourism."
▽ [Photo via the Official WeChat account of Luoyi City Scenic Area]
Luoyang has, based on iQIYI's self-made TV drama "Luoyang", created a large-scale immersive "script murder". It also held live-action game interactive activities entitled "Night Tour of Treasure Hunt in Flourishing Divine Capital" based on the Tencent game "King of Troubled Times". This kind of "script murder" product featuring scripts based on the history and culture of Luoyang, and real scenarios of Luoyang's scenic areas, is expected to further enhance the cultural influence of Luoyang, make the city image of Luoyang more three-dimensional and comprehensive in the minds of young people, and contribute to the building of a youth-friendly city.
△ [Photo via Sui-Tang Luoyang City]
At present, immersive cultural tourism features a pioneering trend and growth potential, whose application of "immersive experience" to promote the development of cultural tourism industry is gradually bringing history and culture "within reach".
