Hello! This is Realworld, the playable content platform. When traveling to regional tourist destinations, if you can't use your own car, you'll need to rely on local public transportation. It would be great if tourist attractions were close to train stations, but that's often not the case. What can you do during the bus ride to your destination? Pay attention if you want to find answers to this question!
Making Travel Time Fun: XR Bus WOW RIDE
A bus departing from JR Fukui Station in a small provincial city in Japan. From the outside, it just looks like a bus with fun wrapping, but what makes this bus special? Looking inside, you can spot something different. OLED displays are installed not only on all windows but even on the ceiling.
Fukui Prefecture's WOW RIDE uses XR video on displays to give passengers the experience of exploring new worlds. The bus flies through the sky like an airplane and becomes a submarine gracefully swimming through the ocean. Outside the windows, scenes from the Edo period appear, and dinosaurs show up to ram into the bus. Through these various productions, passengers never have a dull moment. While experiencing thrilling adventures inside the bus, it arrives at the destination before you know it.
The WOW RIDE bus operates round trips from the station to museums, historic sites, hot springs, and more, playing themed videos according to the operating routes. Not only can passengers enjoy their travel time, but they can also learn about various aspects of Fukui Prefecture and gain information, making it educational too. It seems like it would be popular with family tourists.
What if City Tour Buses Evolved?
Looking at the WOW RIDE case made me think about applying this to urban city tour buses. So I looked it up, and sure enough, WOW RIDE also operates Tokyo city tour buses. While it's slightly different from Fukui Prefecture's case of making travel time less boring, Tokyo's city tour bus also provides experiences that let you enjoy Tokyo's attractions in a more realistic and immersive way.
XR experiences through displays can be seen as an evolution from traditional city tour buses that rely on audio guides, but the experience of directly seeing actual tourist sites with your own eyes is also important. However, if we could use transparent displays instead of covered windows to enjoy tourist sites more realistically, wouldn't that enhance the user experience?
Turning Inconvenient Accessibility into Charm!
When we travel, we consider various factors. We might think of stunning scenery at tourist destinations, delicious food, good accommodations, and so on. Travel time is also an essential consideration. In fact, according to a 2015 study, when the travel time-distance (not physical distance, but reflecting tourists' choice of shortest routes considering road speeds from their starting point) for domestic tourists in Korea increases by one minute, tourism demand decreases inelastically by 0.005%.
Particularly, if travel time-distance exceeds 75.2 minutes, it can be interpreted as a tourism effect exclusion zone where tourism demand decreases exponentially. This means demand disappears because costs exceed tourist utility. But it wouldn't be efficient to just build airports and train stations everywhere to improve accessibility to tourist destinations.
So what if we think about it the other way around? If we can't reduce travel time, we can make that time fun and valuable. Just like the WOW RIDE case. Korea also has many beautiful and worthwhile tourist destinations that are somewhat inconvenient to access, and it seems we need paradoxical attempts to make travel time attractive.
Realworld delivers cases from various experience industries both domestically and internationally. We'll return next time with even more interesting and useful content. Thank you.