The cultural tourism market is on the rise, and competition in the consumer AR market is fierce

文/VR Gyroscope Wanli

Recently, the augmented reality (AR) market continues to heat up

Since August, a number of AR glasses products have been launched on the market: ARKnovv A1, Xrany X1, EZXR AR-Glasses, Rokid Max Pro, INMO Go...

It is worth noting that Xrany X1, EZXR AR-Glasses, and Rokid Max Pro are all focusing on the cultural tourism market

AR Can cultural tourism become the next golden place for AR manufacturers?

The implementation of AR cultural tourism experience is accelerating, and interaction with navigation is a common way of playing

2021 is the year when the "Metaverse" explodes, and this year's release of Apple's Vision Pro has made the concept of "spatial computing" popular. The two will have certain differences in concepts and understanding of future development, but The underlying technical support is the same, and it all involves VR/AR, 5G, artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital twins, etc. Rewritten content: 2021 is the year when the "Metaverse" explodes, and the release of Apple Vision Pro this year triggered a craze for the concept of "spatial computing". Although there are certain differences in the understanding and future development direction of these two concepts, their underlying technical support is the same, both involving virtual reality/augmented reality, 5G, artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital twins and other fields

Currently, in addition to the rapid development of consumer electronics, various industries have begun to see a trend of accelerated integration with metaverse/space computing. For example, there are emerging application cases in fields such as AR medical care, VR education, and AR industry. At the same time, more and more practical application cases have appeared in the traditional cultural tourism industry

At the end of last year, Beijing Minsheng Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition called "The Mark of Civilization: Dunhuang Art Exhibition". During the exhibition, what attracted a lot of attention was the launch of the "Dunhuang AR Intelligent Tour" project. When visitors wear AR glasses to visit the exhibition, they can see a virtual tour guide based on a nine-color deer. Compared with real tour guides, virtual tour guides have a higher degree of freedom and can also provide tourists with more background information such as audio and video to deepen their understanding. In addition, with the help of AR technology, static murals seem to become alive, and conventional historical allusions can be displayed in front of tourists in a more flexible way

Source: Internet

At the end of last year, British Telecom cooperated with technology company Seymour Powell to launch a city-level AR cultural tourism project. This project fully transforms the tourism experience of Stirling, a famous tourist city in Scotland, into augmented reality technology: after local tourists download a specific application, they can enjoy the aforementioned AR tours, classic introductions and historical reviews. In addition, the application also incorporates many gamification elements. For example, when users successfully climb the steps of the National Wallace Monument, they can obtain a 3D model of the landmark; through LBS AR such as finding virtual unicorns under specific locations, content, you can also unlock personalized badges

Source: Internet

Yixian co-founder Liu Haiwei told VR Gyro: "In the era of experience economy, traditional cultural and tourism experiences can no longer meet new consumer needs. Judging from current consumer trends, 'dynamic' experiences are more popular among consumers. Love it. With the support of AR technology, the cultural tourism industry can form a dynamic interactive gameplay. The immersive experience is unmatched by traditional media in the past, which exactly caters to the consumption characteristics of contemporary consumers."

Huang Minqiang, product director of Yuanni, said that for operators of museums and scenic spots, there is always a need to create more creative displays and activities, but the current pain point lies in the construction cycle and cost of physical space. It is too long, and the existing two-dimensional space display method is more common. For consumers, they need a more interesting and fun content experience. In this case, AR experience can better meet the needs of both parties.

AR×Cultural tourism mainly involves the following gameplay experiences. If we break it down:

1. AR navigation. With the help of VPS, SLAM, augmented reality and other technologies, the device can sense the orientation and orientation information of the current environment, and then overlay real-time navigation arrows and other content in the real environment, thus providing users with a senseless navigation experience. AR navigation is based on machine vision and AI technology, which can achieve higher positioning accuracy and can effectively cover GPS signal blind spots such as shopping malls and underground parking lots.

Chinese Valentine’s Day AR show, photo source: Yixian×Ciqi Changge

2. Exhibition and explanation. In museums and other settings, in the past, tourists often had to rely on tour guides or posters and manuals to understand the various cultural relics on display. When AR glasses are introduced, tourists can unlock one-on-one virtual tour guides, and they can view exhibitions more freely. In addition, AR glasses can also project specific video materials in front of exhibits, or turn cultural relics into 3D so that tourists can "hold" them in their hands for multi-angle viewing.

Source: Yuan Ni

3. Special effects superposition. For protected cultural relics such as ancient buildings, one of the most important maintenance principles is to respect the original materials and structures and try to avoid making too many changes on this basis. AR technology can realize the superposition of special effects based on reality. For example, AR light shows, historical reenactments, changing weather environments, etc. can provide many "non-invasive" experiences.

Source: Epson

4. Social game. At present, most scenic spots such as museums focus on seeing and listening, and lack the fun of hands-on experience. However, AR can easily build various virtual games or multiplayer space social interactions, such as war simulations, AR blessings, virtual message walls, etc. These activities can not only satisfy tourists' desire to take photos and check in, but also increase the stickiness of the attractions.

AR blessing experience in the Chenghuang Pavilion project, source: Yixian

Environmental awareness is a critical need in cultural and tourism scenarios, and gesture recognition is expected to become an ideal interaction solution

From the usage scenarios mentioned above, it is not difficult to find that AR glasses for culture and tourism are actually somewhat different from common consumer-grade AR glasses. The latter are mainly used for large-screen viewing, private office, etc. Usage scenarios Prefers static. In scenarios such as cultural, business and travel, the usage scenarios are more dynamic, and there are higher requirements for the wearing comfort and battery life of glasses. In addition, whether it is navigation or object recognition, it requires the support of related technologies such as environment perception and virtual and real fusion. Therefore, cultural and tourism AR glasses need to be targeted and optimized based on users and scenarios.

Take Rokid Air Pro as an example. This product was released in October last year and is currently a product that appears frequently in major museums. Rokid Air Pro adopts a split design, and the optical solution is BirthBath Micro-OLED. Products of the same type are usually equipped with light-shielding lenses to provide better display effects, but light-shielding lenses will reduce the light transmittance of the glasses and are not conducive to observing the real environment. To solve this problem, Rokid Air Pro adopts a foldable light-shielding lens design, which to a certain extent solves the problem of switching between real and virtual scenes

Source: Rokid

In terms of interaction, Rokid Air Pro is specially optimized for voice. Since the museum visitor group is relatively diverse, the equipment needs to cope with various usage needs. Therefore, voice interaction with a relatively low threshold is an ideal solution. However, voice interaction is easily affected by noisy environments. In this case, Rokid Air Pro has been specially optimized for noise reduction and directional recognition, with faster response speed. Its data points out that the device recognition accuracy can be as high as 98%.

Unlock the AR experience by scanning the identification code or voice command, source: Shanghai History Museum

At the end of August, Rokid Air Pro ushered in its successor: Rokid Max Pro. This product has similar specifications to the previously released Rokid Max, with a 50° large FoV. In addition, it is equipped with a single grayscale camera directly in front, which can be used for SLAM and gesture recognition.

Source: Rokid

The Xrany X1 recently released by Yuan Ni uses a Micro-OLED Birdbath solution, which is similar to the Rokid Air Pro. It is equipped with a special computing box Xrany Space1, and adds two fisheye grayscale cameras and an RGB camera in front of the glasses. Among them, grayscale cameras are mainly used for SLAM and gesture recognition, while RGB cameras are used for object recognition and tracking

In terms of some details, Xrany X1 introduces the automatic ambient light recognition function to facilitate users to move around and explore. In addition, this product is equipped with various common interaction methods on the market, including rays, buttons, touch and gestures. Huang Minqiang pointed out that the first three are common in current life, and they are highly accepted by users and easy to use. With the iteration of future technology development and the cooperation with perception and AI technology, gesture recognition is expected to become one of the most potential interaction methods.

Source: Yuan Ni

Yixian EZXR AR-Glasses starts from the aspects of integration and large FoV. This product uses an off-axis optical solution. The principle is that the light from the display is reflected to the eyes through the lens. The disadvantage is that it is relatively bulky, but the advantage is that users can wear glasses, the FoV can be made larger (72°), and it has Better light transmittance. In addition, the product has a built-in 4300mAh battery and the mainstream VR headset processor Snapdragon XR2, which can be used to build a more diverse offline entertainment experience.

Compared with hardware, Yixian’s core advantage is more reflected in its relatively complete AR experience software service support. For example, in terms of SLAM and gesture algorithms, its 6DoF positioning and tracking accuracy can reach 0.05%, OST optical display calibration reaches centimeter-level virtual and real alignment accuracy, and 3D object tracking reaches centimeter-level virtual and real anchoring accuracy. In addition, Yixian has also launched AR cloud platform services such as content creation editor and spatial map resource center, which can effectively reduce the threshold for spatial point cloud map scanning and uploading and AR content construction.

Source: Yi Xian

As the market picks up, AR cultural tourism comes at the right time

Liu Haiwei pointed out that the current domestic cultural tourism market is ushering in comprehensive development opportunities, and combining cutting-edge technologies such as augmented reality will become an important development trend in the industry

According to data released by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the total number of domestic tourism trips in the first half of this year reached 2.384 billion, and domestic tourism revenue (total tourism expenditure) reached 2.3 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 63.9% and 95.9%. At the same time, the country has also introduced a series of policy support focusing on the cultural tourism market. For example, last year, five national departments jointly issued the "Virtual Reality and Industry Application Integration Development Action Plan (2022-2026)". The notice mentioned that "encourage one or two Level museums and qualified tourist activity venues should be equipped with immersive experience facilities and equipment.”

Coincidentally, the "Notice of the General Office of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Carrying out the Recommendation of National Cultural and Tourism Science and Technology Innovation R&D Projects in 2023" mentioned that immersive culture and tourism experience are key support projects of the department, and key projects have the opportunity to enjoy Project subsidies to about 100,000 yuan.

Terminal manufacturers currently face greater resistance to achieving profitability in the consumer market, so many manufacturers choose to focus on B-end markets such as cultural tourism. Luo Yonghao revealed in an interview last year that according to the AR advancement timeline, the next 2-3 years will be the period of commercialization of special-purpose vertical AR equipment, while the commercialization of general-purpose AR equipment will take about 5 years. Therefore, for terminal manufacturers, the easier way to achieve profitability currently is to target the B-end market

Source: Internet

Recently, palanAR, a Japanese WebAR technology service provider, conducted a questionnaire on AR cultural tourism. Survey data shows that many respondents expressed their willingness to pay for AR experiences that interest them. Among these experiences, the number one experience is "projection mapping AR", with respondents willing to pay an average of 534.5 yen (approximately RMB 26.6). Tourists are willing to pay for newer and more immersive experiences, which provides huge revenue opportunities for AR companies and cultural tourism attractions

Source: palanAR

Gyro Jun learned that some museums currently adopt a rental model for AR experiences, such as the AR glasses project of the Shanghai History Museum, which charges 50 yuan each time and has no limit on the length of the experience. In terms of conversion rate, the previous Liangzhu Ancient City AR guide project reached 2% during the National Day in 2020, that is, 2 out of 100 people rented it. This data is actually quite good

Not only that, the cultural tourism market is different from industrial, medical and other scenarios. It is a typical B2C market, and products can be directly oriented to consumers. This is conducive to companies receiving more real feedback in an agile way, and plays a role in The role of market education. In this regard, AR cultural tourism can make a simple analogy with VR experience centers. According to IDC data, 25% of PC VR devices in the domestic head-mounted display market in 2017 went to VR experience centers. In addition to market exploration, the VR experience center also played the role of popularizing science and literacy to the public. According to GyroJun’s survey, many colleagues’ first exposure to VR was at the VR experience center. In the future, the AR cultural tourism market may also become an important platform for early terminal experience and accumulate energy for the explosion of consumer hardware products

As mentioned before, companies such as Rokid, Yixian and Yuanni have achieved a lot in the field of AR cultural tourism and are constantly increasing their efforts. Among them, Rokid revealed that it has cooperated with more than 100 first-level museums and 5A scenic spots in China. In addition, since this year, Rokid has also reached strategic cooperation with Fliggy Travel, cultural tourism operator Shiji Cultural Tourism Group and other companies

Liu Haiwei pointed out that as early as 2021, Yixian had identified offline scenarios as important operational scenarios for the implementation of AR technology. In the subsequent development, it can be seen that Yixian has implemented a series of AR cultural tourism cases. , such as the AR travel experience created in cooperation with Hangzhou Songcheng Scenic Area, and the AR painting reading in the "Chinese Painting Series of Ancient Dynasties" special exhibition. Not only that, Yixian has also reached strategic cooperation with Tencent Cultural Tourism and Shandong Cultural Tourism Media this year. More cases and activities will be launched in the future. Huang Minqiang also revealed that the first batch of Xrany X1 and Space1 products have been put into use in scenic spots such as Hukou Waterfall and Leshan Giant Buddha, and will also reach cooperation with more well-known museums.

Relevant data points out that as of 2021, there are 5,772 museum institutions nationwide and 14,196 A-level tourist attractions. Judging from the coverage of AR, there is still great development potential and room for imagination.

At present, the AR software ecosystem is still in its infancy, and AR cultural tourism is expected to become one of the important windows for users to truly experience AR features such as environmental perception, virtual and real integration, and real-time interaction in the future.

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