Travel almost for FREE with this one weird tip! One insane way to reduce your spending on airline tickets now.

The issue:

Travel to exotic locales can be expensive, inconvenient, and perhaps even dangerous or impossible.

Proposal:

Using the same technology that companies like Google use to get street view images (now available in 40-lb backpack format as well: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=google+street+view+camera ), we can set up a scenario where you can conduct tourism by proxy using a VR headset.

This would work as follows:

  • You submit a request online, like “I’d like to see the pyramids of Giza.”
  • Someone who is already in the vicinity accepts your request. You pay them and they put on a panoramic street view camera.
  • You then call them up and perform the VR equivalent of a Skype / FaceTime / Hangouts call.
  • The tour guide will either walk around on their own, or perhaps take requests from the remote viewer.

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Fig. 1: This fashionable individual in a VR headset is standing comfortably at home while getting a VR tour of Egyptian pyramids, which is directed by the person in Figure 2.

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Fig. 2: This “VR tour guide” is carrying the cameras and microphones so that the individual in Figure 1 can get an immersive real-time VR tour of the pyramids.

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Fig. 3: In addition to enabling extremely lazy travelers, VR tours could be used to experience otherwise difficult or impossible environments.

Eco-friendly final point:

This technology would also reduce the amount of energy expended on travel (particularly via airplane), which both saves fuel and also reduces the number of greenhouse gasses generated.

PROS: Saves time, money, and the environment.

CONS: Might negatively impact revenue at certain difficult-to-access tourist destinations like Machu Picchu.