Our relationship with virtual tourism. The metaverse report danger...

The title of this article is a question that was put to me on QUORA, and before giving any hints as to the answers, let's recall the promises of the Metaverse, and those of tourism.

Metaverse definition

Metavers in French. It's an open tool, fully customizable by its users. It's an evolution of Internet use whose main value propositions are :

• A spatialized, immersive digital world built by its users
• Persistent (when I turn off my PC, the world lives on)
• The ability to interact with virtual elements in the environment and with other users
• The ability to manage your avatar (appearance, gestures, gait, expressions, etc.). With subjective view in VR helmet immersion and/or 3rd person avatars (piloted and seen from the outside). Long-lasting avatars.
• Ubiquity (being in several places at once, piloting several avatars if you wish)
• A diversity of users and communities
• Freedom unconstrained by arbitrary moral rules
• A universe with its own economy
• An interoperable tool, with the ability to manage possessions and move from one environment to another if different Metaverse bricks were based on different technologies.
• A multi-platform tool (PC, MAC, smartphones, virtual reality headsets, mixed reality...)
• Decentralization and security (data is certified, and the system belongs to the users, not to a single entity)

Tourism

For a long time, tourism was the only way to discover other people and places, long before the advent of modern communication and even transportation tools. In our modern society, tourism has become synonymous with :

• Job creation
• Infrastructure and service development
• Heritage preservation and enhancement
• Cultural exchanges
• Mutual understanding
• Local community development

Virtual tourism via the metaverse?

Let's frame the subject a little: before talking about a "metaverse danger", it's worth pointing out that the Metaverse doesn't yet exist in its absolute form(article); it's being built in bricks, but is already inducing new uses that prefigure it! For tourists, the Metaverse will never replace a visit or a trip, just as flight simulation has never replaced the pleasure of flying, or put amateur (or pro) pilots out of work. Nor have car racing games with immersive headsets replaced real racetracks.

However, we need to think about how we "consume" travel. I was discussing this with a friend not long ago, who told me that his experience of visiting the Sistine Chapel was not the best memory of his stay in Italy: crowds, hubbub, everyone shoulder-to-shoulder, noses up, eyes on their smartphones... It's a far cry from a mystical or architectural experience.

Today, a digital twin lets us immerse ourselves in it for as long as we like, dimming the lights, with spatialized sound, letting us fly up to the ceiling, see details of the paintings, connect with friends, a personal guide, etc... with an ambience so close to the original, that one wonders if it's still worth creating such a human flow on the real monument. Especially as most of the time, it's become a case of ticking a box on your list of selfies for your Instagram account.

So, from a French or Italian perspective, a virtual visit to the Sistine Chapel may seem excessive, but is it really so absurd when you think about it? Would a Japanese or a Hawaiian have the same point of view? "Virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel" is a very popular keyword on Google, as is "virtual tour of the Château de Versailles", "virtual tour of the Louvre" or "virtual tour of the Grotte de Lascaux". And from France, do we think the same of more distant destinations?

Wasn't there also a craze to revisit Notre Dame intact, just after its tragic fire? All of a sudden, the virtual world was becoming an essential conservatory of heritage, accessible from anywhere, and "notre dame de paris virtual tour" was skyrocketing in Google Trends! ScanPyramids VR, the virtual tour of the Khéops pyramid organized by the Cité de l'architecture in Paris, was such a success that the operation is regularly restarted. The tour teleports a group of six people, equipped with a VR headset and accompanied by a guide, onto the Giza plateau for forty-five minutes.

"This form of off-ground tourism or tourism 4.0 will develop without eclipsing tourism, which remains a time to experience elsewhere. The virtual enables multisensory experiences or experiences that are impossible in the real world, but it won't replace climbing Mont Blanc, for example."
David Nahon, Director of Immersive Experience at Dassault Systèmes(article).

The place of social issues

Visiting a digital twin of the Vatican doesn't mean that its "in real life" access is off-limits to the public, but it does mean thinking about how and why we consume tourism. Above all, it's a reflection on our individual behavior towards the most popular tourist sites, which are often subject to excessive pressure . On theother hand, life in the surrounding neighborhoods, the little restaurants, the human exchanges, the atmospheres, the smells, the local recipes, etc... all made the richness of my friend's trip.

The uses

It's all about thinking about use, and the relevance of use!

The tool could enable several people to share an immersive experience in a place that cannot otherwise be shared between friends, or members of the same community: because it's too far away, too expensive, or as mentioned above, too much tourist pressure (and therefore needs to be preserved), too dangerous for me, etc.

Given the pressure on tourism, these tools provide an opportunity to discover new places, and better distribute visitor flows. In some countries, such as France, we're talking about using social network influencers to propose new destinations, to preserve others; VR headsets and applications on their Stores are a good way to discover and prepare.  

Thanks to digital twins, and if you feel like it, you can go and visit your chosen accommodation in immersion on a 1:1 scale, prepare a slightly complicated hike (get your bearings, get an idea of the difficulties), etc. My children have never visited a site with as much curiosity and playfulness as the day they visited Mont-Saint-Michel in Second Life the day before going there "in real life": they were on the lookout for all the little details they'd had time to observe "flying" over the streets or "diving" into the basements. Surprisingly, the surprise and discovery were multiplied tenfold.

Mont Saint-Michel in Second Life https://secondlife.com/destination/1338

It can also complement a tourist site, offering visitors the chance to immerse themselves in the past or the future, either on-site or remotely, through rich interactions!

The place of art and nature

FranceFrance, the world's leading travel destination and oldest tourist nation, can set an example by reflecting on the place of art in vacations, and respect for nature, landscapes and local people.
Jean VIARD, sociologist and CNRS research director at Cevipof, Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po Paris.

The NøøMuseum, virtual museum, or the "First Virtual Science Fiction Festival After The End Of The World"; inaugurated in May 2013, is the dematerialized extension in cyberspace of the "Festival de la Science Fiction et de l'imaginaire de Roanne" founded thirty years ago. The production of its various digital versions is the fruit of a collective effort involving artists, sound designers and network technologies.

Real-time 3D reconstruction of Velasquez's painting Las Meninas, by Yann Minh for the Noomusueum, with the possibility of wandering IN the painting to better understand its composition. https://www.noomuseum.net/

We could also mention experiences that bring us closer to nature, some of which are inaccessible to many of us, or not (any more) to be had for conservation reasons: the summits of high mountains, deep dives, journeys into lost heritage, into the future...

In the virtual experiences we've built up, I remember Laurent Ballesta, oceanologist and naturalist photographer, saying in October 2013 "Ohlaa, I'm going back!" as he discovered an immersive virtual dive to a depth of 120 m with the Coelacanth, which he had studied in the Gulf of Mozambique .

At the time, he took pleasure in pointing out that fewer people had dived with this mythical fish than there had been men on the Moon... 4 minutes to descend to 120 m, but the 5-hour decompression stop ascent in open water for 30 minutes of exploration at the bottom, the physical training, the cost of the equipment and the complexity of the gas mixtures to be breathed must have had something to do with it...

Laurent Ballesta - January 2014, pointing at a Coelacanth, 120m down... 

We brought the experience to hundreds of people in January 2014 at the Paris International Diving Show. Today, 10 years on, the experience is portable in any home for the price of a smartphone. Tomorrow, it will be standard.

Drawing a parallel between the Moon, space and the visitor's standard, there's also a free online "iss virtual tour" of the International Space Station (with VR headsets or on your PC).

The Metaverse, like virtual reality and augmented reality tools, is a relevant way of creating a continuum of visit, enabling a link between before, during and after the visit. And it's a place where we socialize, just as we do in Second Life (an ancestor of the Metaverse), where I worked for over 4 years and met "users", initially through their avatars, who became friends and/or partners "in real life". Let's not forget that in 2021, Second Life's gross domestic product (the money generated by transactions in the platform's internal currency, which many say is "dead") will amount to $650 million.

What kind of tourism do we want?

If we bounce off this "consumer tourism" phenomenon, we shouldn't forget the new generation raised on Fortnite or Minecraft, with their hundreds of millions of users. Universes in which we don't just play games, but also create content, attend shows, and socialize online, and... in the real world, with the organization of events that bring together tens of thousands of people in the same place.

As a result, tourism and local businesses are boosted! And this is certainly where the real debate begins, as not all tourist sites are prepared for this:

"What kind of tourism do we want for tomorrow, and how will new tools impact our most harmful behaviors?"

Jul 27, 2019; Flushing, NY, USA; A general view of Athur Ashe Stadium during the Fortnite World Cup Finals e-sports event at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Dennis Schneidler-USA TODAY Sports

To find out more about the promise of the Metaverse:
https://www.explorations360.com/15-ans-dans-le-metaverse/

To take a closer look at tourism, sociologist Jean Viard looks back at the year of the pandemic and how it permanently altered our sense of travel and vacations:
https://www.lepoint.fr/voyages/l-an-zero-du-tourisme-12-06-2021-2430682_44.php#11

Captation Metaverse conference

by Pascal Guitton with the participation of Philippe Carrez

The "L'invité(e) du jeudi" conferences - a partnership between Cnam Bretagne and AFAS - are offered every month. Hosted by experts with a passion for their field, they deal with topical issues, but with the necessary distance. https://www.cnam-bretagne.fr/actu...

"METAVERS, WHY?" Lecture recorded on Thursday March 9, 2023 by Pascal Guitton, Professor Emeritus University of Bordeaux & Inria, with the participation of Philippe Carrez, director of "Immersion Tools", a company specializing in virtual reality in Saint-Brieuc.

For a little over a year now, we've been confronted with an avalanche of announcements concerning the emergence of metavers; sometimes dithyrambic, sometimes catastrophic, most often excessive in one sense or another. The aim of Pascal Guitton's presentation is firstly to provide a clear understanding of what metavers might be, where they might come from and what they might be used for. Secondly, we'll look at the main #risks associated with this type of service.

Other articles on the Metaverse here:
https://www.explorations360.com/15-ans-dans-le-metaverse/

(Photo: Cooperl Environnement's immersive room)

Rarely enough to be noticed, this file did not arrive via the classic route of our lively sales force!

It came to us via one of our partners👍, with whom we usually collaborate (on all video and sound equipment): @Loops to name but one. A professional and reliable partner with whom we share real values!

And already in the loop were other entities whose specialties overlapped ours:

A special mention goes to @Mediapilote, a 360° communications agency, whose manager Michèle was soon responsible for the overall coordination of what would turn out to be a first-rate project for all of us!

The idea: to create an innovative showroom concept, enabling a company that has historically been very reserved to communicate not only its unique know-how, but above all its ecological and societal commitment.

An immersive room

The concept: a dedicated 50m² space featuring a 19-meter-wide curved screen on which content produced by the consortium is projected in immersive mode. Videos, 3D animations, motion designs, interviews, audios - all media scripted and edited to tell an incredible story!

Featuring a 50 m² circular room, the bubble, located in the Beausoleil zone in Lamballe, is a gateway for breeders and the general public to the activities of this subsidiary of the Cooperl pork industry group (Crédit Photo explorations360).

And this incredible story is that of @CooperlENVIRONNEMENT!

Cooperl ENVIRONNEMENT is at the cutting edge of its field, and it's high time people knew it!

On the other hand, let it be known, Ok ... But especially not to make "Cock-a-doodle-doo on the fence" !!! Not really the Cooperative's style...

Rather, the aim is to demonstrate that this leading player in the meat production chain has been thinking ahead for a long time!

At 30 years more than 300 million euros have been invested to place the environment at the heart of our production strategy... in particular by producing BIOENERGIES from WATER or even NATURAL FERTILIZERSfrom livestock breeding and meat processing.

That, in a nutshell, is our roadmap.

From this intention, it was necessary to draw up an action plan around which to federate the energies of structures capable of working in a perfectly complementary way to :

• Imagine the storytelling, the words and testimonials for this story to be told (@Mediapilote & @Mr Joe),
  Imagine the venue (@BW Architects) and what it should look like,
• Imagine a name for this showcase, imagine a setting, imagine the wealth of content, imagine the right way to present it,
• Imagining the technologies to be mobilized (@Loops)
• That, at last, the technical side of things disappears completely behind the message and the people behind it... And that's where we (@ImmersionTools / @explorations360😉) were able to make our contribution!

The added value of explorations360 & IMMERSION TOOLS: to make technology simple and accessible, even though it is complex and omnipresent!
In other words, to create a content editing and presentation tool accessible via a control tablet that is simple and flexible to use, and centralizes all the tools required by the presenter.

A complete system for creating, scripting and managing the entire presentation infrastructure.

The most interesting thing about this collaboration, in retrospect, is that it all came together naturally, based on the initial intuition that all these entities were made to work together!

Everyone then naturally took their place in the scheme, assuming their share of added value and willingly collaborating with what ended up becoming a "Dream Team". Dream Team " ! (in the words of Franck PORCHER and Anne-Julie PLOUVIER, Cooperl ENVIRONNEMENT's Managing Director and Marketing and Communications Manager respectively).

Less than a year in project mode will have enabled us to inaugurate this mediation and communication center for customers, institutions, schools, associations and, tomorrow, tourists!

Tight timing and high expectations linked to the project's ambitions sealed the energies of each stakeholder around a common goal: to create an outstanding tool!
Outstanding for :

• The customer, to enable him to demonstrate his ambitions and roadmap through an immersive and innovative communication tool,
• The consortium, to enable it to implement this synergy of skills and talents for the first time, and why not give itself the means to replicate the approach with other customers.

THE FINAL WORD:

At IMMERTION TOOLS, whatever our level of involvement in a project, we're always just as committed! You can't change who you are.
Whether working on our own behalf or as part of a consortium, we put all our energy into ensuring the success of our customers' projects. From the consulting and design phase through to development and production, we take great care to maintain the relationship of trust we enjoy with our customers and partners alike.

And that's and will remain our trademark!

To be continued...

"If it's still a buzzword to its insiders, metavers is no longer a novelty to its enthusiasts, as it's been around for over 20 years. On the B2B side, opportunities relating to metavers already exist, and capital-intensive industries are already tapping into the undeniable monetization potential of virtual worlds in various forms"
(source: METADAYS 2022)

Does the Metaverse exist or not?

Just one year ago (at the time of writing), Facebook became " Meta ", appropriating the word " Metaverse ", for some to total indifference, for others by entering directly into the top 10 of ultra-clivant polemics on social networks.

At either end of the battlefield, to put it crudely: Cyberpunk culture enthusiasts (1), facing advertisers (2) in search of viral marketing, and in the middle, players in the process of structuring their services.
All of this is played out in front of a public that is often dubious and lost in this nebula of announcements and articles from a plethora of "great specialists". 

• • (1) The former are fans of utopias or dystopias, in particular the novel Snow Crash*. They dream of traveling with their alter-ego through a digital parallel world close to our own, where all fantasies are possible, describing a technologically advanced but rather disorganized universe. For them, the Metaverse doesn't yet exist.
  • (2) The latter are advertisers, and as soon as you mention an online shared space, a virtual reality headset, or a 360° experience, they conjure up this magic word, "Metaverse", as in the-jeu-du-mot-mystery to be placed at all costs during a party, even if nobody understands what it's for!

* Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson - 1992: in his novel, the author describes a rather apocalyptic universe from which the characters can momentarily escape by plunging into a parallel virtual reality universe, a "meta-universe", which he calls the Metaverse. The Greek prefix META is particularly well-chosen, since depending on the context, it expresses reflection, change, succession, going beyond, alongside, between or with. Spielberg's "Ready Player One" is an example of this kind of escape.

But then... who's right?

There's no simple answer, but let's just say that today there are embryos of this new world, "protometaverses", each with their own uses.

frankly, do we have any useful examples?

Where there's use, there's need. Paradoxically, our business in the immersive tools industry began with questions relating to our hobbies. In the team, we love the sea (we live nearby), and we're divers. A few years ago, when my club put me in charge of teaching scuba diving theory, I realized that nothing had changed in the 70 years of recreational diving: the technologies had evolved, but not the methods! In the age of Web 2.0 and 3D Gaming, we were still stuck with "cobbled-together" books full of formulas, and no solutions in place to get around the most recurrent problems:

• explain things that are sometimes boring and/or complex (physics or biology courses, repetitive exercises, unsuitable training rooms, etc.).
• use heavy, ultra-technical equipment, limited in quantity, time-consuming to prepare and only available to certified operators (diving cylinders, high-pressure inflation, creating different gas mixtures, etc.).
• bring learners together in the same place at the same time to optimize supervisor resources
• check what you've learned in an environment that can become very hostile (far underwater) if you haven't assimilated the course properly

Simple training...

OK, but having said that, we had to find the right tool...

 
What better way to overcome these obstacles than to create an environment that resembles our own: immersive, 360° spatialized, where we can all invite each other in and chat as if in real life, reaching each other in 2 clicks without needing our cars?

And what if you could distribute as much material as you wanted, vary the laws of physics, die 3 times an hour from decompression sickness and come back to life... all via your avatar, from the comfort of your sofa with a cold drink in hand?

In 2007, an immersive online world made it all possible: Second Life®, and we made the most of it!

One of our franchise stores in Second Life, where you can buy simulation equipment
to take courses or experience diving in real time (around 15,000 outfits sold).

The advantage of this tool is that it can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone via an Internet connection. PADI® (6,600 dive centers and bases and over 128,000 professional members) was intrigued, and the volunteer work for the dive club turned into a business specializing in immersion. Since then, training has been provided virtually by PADI®, via our "subOceana®" brand of diving simulation equipment (don't surf, dive into the web).

Twelve years after its debut, in the midst of a pandemic, we had to give it a facelift to accommodate new features, to come to the rescue of clubs whose training rooms had emptied of members! Today, a training session costs 250€ and delivers the same certificate to everyone, whether in a diving club or in Second Life®.

Say, what's it like inside?

The Metaverse is not a video game. Games can indeed be created, but it is above all an open tool, fully customizable by its users. It's an evolution of Internet use whose main value propositions are : 

• • A spatialized, immersive digital world built by its users
  • Persistent (when I turn off my PC, the world lives on)
  • The ability to interact with virtual elements in the environment and with other users
  • The ability to manage your avatar (appearance, gestures, gait, expressions, etc.). With subjective view in VR helmet immersion and/or 3rd person avatars (piloted and seen from the outside). Long-lasting avatars.
  • Ubiquity (being in several places at once, piloting several avatars if you wish)
  • A diversity of users and communities
  • Freedom unconstrained by arbitrary moral rules
  • A universe with its own economy
  • An interoperable tool, with the ability to manage possessions and move from one environment to another if different Metaverse bricks were based on different technologies.
  • A multi-platform tool (PC, MAC, smartphones, virtual reality headsets, mixed reality...)
  • Decentralization and security (data is certified, and the system belongs to the users, not to a single entity)

These proposals are organized in 7 layers, a model of which is shown below:

Building the Metaverse ©JonRadoff

The Internet is becoming increasingly spatialized and immersive, and is taking advantage of 3D environments derived from gaming, but to date no platform has ticked all the boxes of the concept: everything is being built in bricks.

So who runs this parallel world?

"The metaverse is not "a metaverse". It is the next generation of the internet: a decentralized multiverse, led by a new and abundant generation of creators."
Jon Radoff

Cyberpunk 2077: the aftermath of the 4th corporate war, also known as the "ocean war".

When a single entity, whether private or state-owned, has a monopoly on user data and distribution channels, the resulting problems of excess or, conversely, censorship are well known: Twitter, Facebook and TikTok are everyday examples. The centralization of information also raises the question of cybersecurity: in Europe, in most large, sensitive companies, it is forbidden to use American digital development tools, in order to avoid data leakage.

In theory, decentralization is the main building block of the Metaverse spirit, but it's still far from being efficient. This is THE source of controversy surrounding Mark Zuckerberg's "META", which has become the symbol of a monopolistic, quasi-totalitarian tool.

Mark vs V, ©explorations360

This feeling is made all the stronger by the fact that everything revolves around a movement at the explosive crossroads of the cyberpunk and libertarian* worlds. It's both a b(r)ouillon of culture(s) and a philosophy that advocates a society based on individual freedom and initiative. People organize and cooperate as they see fit, according to principles of autonomy, responsibility and commitment. Libertarianism is also based on private contract, property rights, the market and free enterprise, with the role of the state limited to that of arbiter and protector of individual freedom.

* The classic libertarian movement (anarcho-capitalism, right-wing minarchism, etc.) is a philosophical movement that sets out strong principles of individual freedom. This current is reinforced by left-wing libertarianism, which adds an egalitarian thesis on the ownership of natural resources.

See the link at the bottom of this article to John Perry Barlow's declaration of independence for cyberspace.

Mathematician Jean-Paul Delahaye gives the image of "a very large notebook that anyone can read, freely and gratuitously, on which anyone can write, but which is impossible to erase and indestructible".

Although all these objectives are far from being achieved, interfaces are being enriched, construction tools are less and less limited, and accessibility has been greatly improved.

Okay, so where do the pros go from here?

all that noise for nothing?

Not for nothing! We're changing the way we approach the dissemination of information and knowledge. Even if WEB3 does not yet exist in its ultimate version, it is being built in functional bricks. Even if these bricks are not all assembled or interoperable today, they are already efficient in their own fields, and have brought their share of changes, new services and uses:

for leisure

• greater ease of networking, creating, chatting, attending a show, cybersex (and yes... it's often a not inconsiderable driving force), training, discovering one's universe, etc.

at work

• manipulate a city's digital twin directly in your web browser
• use real-time simulation for training, onboarding, etc.
• visit an industrial site remotely, using a virtual reality headset
• chat in a "3Dconference" room
• present a product, an idea, a place or a heritage from a distance, but in the same virtual space
• browse a trade show or event in real time and attend conferences, interact remotely
• ...

Prominent Use Cases for the Metaverse, source: Citi Global Insights

These changes are being felt in all sectors: from tourism to industry and training, we've seen a clear shift in customer requirements. Demand goes beyond "Metaverse" integration, to a desire to use innovative or differentiating tools for communication and work.

At the beginning of the WEB1 (the Internet of linked pages), we talked on the keyboard and Powerpoint was born for presentations.

During the WEB2 (the Internet of connected users videoconferencing, Prezi was born for presentations, and Moodle for training.

With the arrival of WEB3 (the Internet of certified and immutable data), we're already talking in spatialized 3D, and...

... and since we're on our Blog, a bit of communication about our work 😋, because precisely, in parallel to our workexploring/exploiting the Metaverse, explorations360 was born out of this observation of changing uses:

Tools are adapting to the evolution of the web and the public entering the job market, raised on Habbo, World of Warcraft, Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite (and their powerful economic engines). We're focusing on content and storytelling, and there's a growing demand to simplify the creation process , script editing and 360° publishing.

If you'd like to explore the Metaverse, understand and anticipate the disruption that's taking place, we can also accompany you and take you on a virtual tour. And come on, you can also try your hand at " Powerpoint for the WEB3 era ": explorations360which can even be integrated into your learning management system.

You're also welcome to take a (real) dive in Brittany!

📢Come and meet us onNOVEMBER 29 & 30, 2022 in PARIS
at the Centre de Congrès Rive Montparnasse, Stand S11 for the METADAYS!

To find out more :

1) The Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace
https://www.explorations360.com/declaration-dindependance-du-cyberespace/

2) French government report. This report, from the perspective of the Metaverse, provides a state-of-the-art overview of digital tools in the broadest sense.