3 Days of Travel Tech
Last week, I attended the Tourism Innovation Summit (TIS) in Seville, gaining some valuable insights into Spain’s tourism technology advancements. The three-day conference featured interesting panel discussions and presentations from both multi-national industry giants as well as some innovative startups.
The event gathered professionals, companies, and experts to explore the future of the tourism industry, discussing the latest trends, technologies, and challenges. Common topics addressed include the impact of digital transformation through technologies like AI, AR, and 3D. It also highlighted investment and entrepreneurship opportunities for startups and investors within the tourism tech landscape, making it a central hub for networking, learning, and uncovering the innovations poised to advance the industry.
AI Tour Guide Experiment in Ronda
During my time in Seville, I took a short drive to the city of Ronda, a famous mountaintop city in the Malaga province that’s dramatically set above a deep gorge. The Puente Nuevo, a stone bridge spanning the gorge, offers a lookout with breathtaking views.
While enjoying the view onto the bridge, I launched Google Gemini’s vision mode on my phone to enable the AI to see what I see and to understand my surroundings and position. I then asked Gemini for a 30-minute sightseeing tour through Ronda to visit the top sights. Although the response is far from perfect, this little experiment shows where the future of travel guides and navigation is headed and how AI will change everything on mobile and of course on smart glasses.
More Gaussian Splatting
As showcased in my article “Explore The Magical 3D Gaussian Splats Museum“, the fairly new 3D scanning and rendering technology has already found its way to some travel and cultural applications. So it was not surprising to see one of the startups leveraging the technology to engage visitors at their booth, including me as you can see below. Gaussian Splatting currently represents the cutting edge, the latest leap forward in capturing and rendering real-world scenes with astonishing fidelity and performance on both desktop and mobile web-browsers. These and other types of virtual experiences are beginning to play an increasingly important role in the marketing mix of destinations.
