Depends on one's imaginative capabilities, honestly. Yes, I'm quite serious. What I've been able to do in dreams (controlled or otherwise) rivals any sand-in-hand experience I could have while waking. I won't claim imagination is a pure replacement for personal experience, but there's something special about abstract thought.
I think you're comparing dreams to memories of experiences. Try comparing your dreams to an experience while it's happening, and I think you'll find the dream was not quite so vivid as the feel, taste, smell, and sight of the world.
They are, and I've done both. But I think two things will limit the majority of people doing the latter: it's expensive, and some experiences are getting very crowded and even limited by ticket.
Things like The Wave, Half Dome, etc are already on permit/lottery systems. Other places are so crowded that it seriously impacts the experience (parts of the Louvre, the Vatican).
Visiting the Sahara from Morocco requires flights, mixture of land travel including hiring a car or driver, procuring camels and so on. Fine for anyone remotely adventurous, but daunting and expensive for others.
> Other places are so crowded that it seriously impacts the experience (parts of the Louvre, the Vatican).
I will never, ever go back to Palais Versailles. The gardens, maybe. Inside? Hell no. It was a really long wait to eventually be shoved through a cattle-chute of an experience for a couple hours, barely able to see anything, unable to take enough time to really look around due to the motion of the crowd, some other tourists constantly shoving me, and wishing more than anything that it was over. You'd have to pay me a fair amount of money to do it again.
Exactly. Had a similar experience in the Vatican. Coupled with restrictions on photography and the like. And it won't improve as more and more people are in a financial position to travel (Chinese middle class, as one example).
I think initially people will decry virtual tourism as inferior but eventually cost and convenience will make it very popular. And then we'll see a seriously blurred line between true tourism (Versailles, for example) and enhanced (Westworld, shot around Moab in Utah) or completely invented worlds (Avatar). And another blurred line between those sorts of traditional experiences and the same being gamified at varying levels.
That's very true. It's a matter of personal preference, and to me the VR experience seems to be surpassing the point at which a physical journey may not be worth the hassle or the cost.
The cost is a problem. But the hassle... Well, it's not a journey to slip on a pair of goggles. The satisfaction of arriving at your destination stands in contrast to the journey.
The joy of summiting a mountain is diminished if you ride a tram to the top instead of climbing it.
