I’ve been in Italy on holiday for the last week, and while looking at extraordinary history from the 13th and 14th centuries, I tried to keep my eye out for what will eventually be extraordinary history from the 21st century. I didn’t find much until one day when wandering by a spanking new tour office with a sign for “iPhone tours.” This intrigued me.
Turns out a week ago, this tourism company started renting iPhones preloaded with dozens of 3- to 10-minute video narratives of key historical sites, museums and the like. Using the phone's visual GPS, I could navigate easily to pretty much any spot in Florence, and the phone included organized itineraries so I could map out a logical order of seeing things.
What had been a somewhat cumbersome experience of finding my way on the map, opening the guide book, finding the page, and reading about what I was seeing, suddenly became entirely now. I was now listening to my own personal guide (in most cases with appropriately chosen music underscoring) and seeing on the video specifically what I should be looking for. It was particularly helpful inside churches where it’s not always clear where to find the chapels.
What was surprisingly helpful was watching the short videos as a way of selecting where to go – there’s never enough time to see everything, and often the descriptions in the guide books are nothing compared to watching a video preview.
What I experienced was version 1.0 of this new product. As the beaming salesperson (who I think may have been the owner of the company) explained, the phones are of course already Web-enabled (which let me check my e-mail and news for free, rather than paying for an internet café or over-priced hotel access), but soon you’ll be able to use it as a real phone for the day as well. So if you’re traveling with someone, now there's a really good way of keeping track of each other, particularly with the new apps that let you see where your friends are on a map.
Just like the Web is no a replacement for printed book, but something rather different, this approach is far more than a electronic replacement for a guide book. I can only imagine how useful it will be when you can call up cultural events happening while you’re in a city, buy tickets that you can use with a bar-coded entrance rather than a ticket, and get discounts already arranged by the tour company.
It also suggests a time when rather than having the tours pre-loaded onto the phone, you could merely stream them directly from a Web site. That opens up tons of possibilities because you won’t then need to rent a particular device – anyone could access any tour from anywhere. And the tours could be developed by anyone – imagine a city-tour for foodies hosted by your favorite celebrity chef, or an art gallery tour given by a noted art historian.
This has the potential to completely revolutionize the travel experience. Those of you who are explorers and cringe at all of this technology removing the sense of discovery will hate this. But I found it to be a whole new way of experiencing travel – and I think it's going to reinvent what some refer to as cultural tourism.
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