Summary

Tourism is emerging from a global crisis. While tourism operators still negotiate the immediate effects of the global pandemic, systemic issues that emerged before the current crisis, e.g. related to the impact of tourism on land and people, remain. This situation offers both challenges and opportunities to build a ‘new’ regenerative tourism model with a unique chance to radically transform the tourism sector. The research will focus on novel interactive and immersive live tourism experiences that can be jointly experienced with others regardless of their location.

For tourists physically present in Aotearoa New Zealand, the goal is to create regenerative tourist experiences, which add value to tourists and locations. For this purpose, we will explore how far human augmentation can be used to create a collective location-based memory and how this can contribute to regenerative tourism. We will further explore location-based game mechanics in relation to collective memory and how games can foster engagement with and learning about regenerative tourism. Major questions around this relate to the kind of experiences and stories relevant to regenerative tourist experiences, ways to (playfully) capture, share and explore these on location, and socio-technical inquiries into ownership and creation of stories and experiences.

Acknowledgement

This project is funded from a MBIE Endeavour Fund Research Programme grant. The programme is lead by Prof. Tobias Langlotz, University of Otago. Read more about the programme at MBIE Grant Funds Sustainable Tourism Research.

HIT Lab NZ Contacts

Prof. Stephan Lukosch 

Assoc. Prof. Heide Lukosch

Project Team