Gerald Ferreira the CEO of the Virtual Reality South African company was recently a Keynote speaker at the ABSA insight series about Tourism in Johannesburg South Africa.
According to Gerald Ferreira people might choose to live in virtual reality in the future and it will have a huge impact on the Travel Industry. Instead of visiting physical places, people may want to visit these places in Virtual Reality first. With the huge investments from Facebook and Google these virtual reality visits will be almost as real as actually visiting the tourism destination. It will also be a social experience, where people will be able to interact with other people in the experience.
There is also a huge advantage for Tour Operators and Travel Agencies, Guesthouses and accommodation providers to get into the industry now. Instead of having someone else from overseas making a Virtual Reality Tourism South African experience – We as South Africa should create the experience first. This will allow us to be in control of the experience and also allow local operators to benefit the most from people wanting to explore South African Virtual Reality destinations in Virtual Reality.
According to Gerald Ferreira Google created one of the biggest existing Virtual Reality platforms in the world. These platforms are already exposed to at least 1 Billion users worldwide per month. The Google Street View, Google Maps and Google Earth platforms to some degree already incorporate virtual reality. In fact most of the buildings, mountains, rivers and landscape is already created in 3D Models which Google Earth Uses.
Gerald Ferreira encouraged tourism South Africa to get involved in virtual reality and to get their guest houses, accommodation providers and the sightseeing spots into Google Maps and Google Earth so that people can see that the accommodation is world class!
