Guest contributor Dan Whitehouse explores how technology is impacting on learning for travellers, and looks at what might happen in the future…

Technology is having a significant impact on how travellers learn about the places we are visiting.

In the past, we were quite reliant on tour guides to learn about the history and significance of the places being visited. Now, travellers can get all this information on a mobile phone right over the internet. Not only that, technology allows travellers to get accurate street directions in the new places they are planning to visit.

This is surely a step up from when we had to stop at the local gas station and ask the clerk behind the counter for directions. Often times, the clerk didn’t speak English and a weary traveller would become lost and annoyed. Technology has added convenience to our experience because we can find any location on a mobile phone and even discover new locations in the area we’re visiting.

Twenty years ago, nobody could have predicted the kind of learning tools that travellers have today.

It is hard to imagine what technological innovations there will be in the future to help travellers learn even more than they do right now.

One possibility is that we will be able to travel and learn about various places in the world without even leaving our homes.

Imagine a virtual reality program where people can actually purchase tickets to go on a tour through a virtual simulation of a real-life location. People who haven’t got the budget or mobility to travel to exotic locations will no longer have to miss out. If they can get their hands on a virtual reality headset, they’ll be able to travel anywhere in the world without having to worry about airports, hotels and car rental.

At the same time, anyone can learn about a foreign location too, with more access than just being ‘broadcast’ to via a book or other media. 

As for those who will still travel for real, holographic tour guides will likely replace human tour guides.

One of the biggest inconveniences with tour guides now is they are always booked and people have to schedule a tour weeks in advance.

But with the holographic tours of the future, a 3D computer-generated tour guide will be able to show you all the sights and explain them to you the way a human tour guide would.  

This will be set up through a series of holographic devices that are placed in different areas of a tour, and some areas of the world are experimenting with this tech now!

Guests can walk to different rooms or locations and see the holographic tour guide appear.

Of course, this might make it harder for human tour guides to get a job, but by then hopefully there’ll be other options that our brains are better equipped for, and we’re probably also better at conversation (at least for the time being).

What do you think?

What’s your view or prediction on how travel and learning will be impacted by smarter tech? Let us know in the comments. 

By Dan Whitehouse

Dan’s writing from Into Forward, a technology and future-trend predictions blog. Into Forward uses a special blend of machine learning and search data for all their trend predictions. The site shares details on ‘the next biggest thing’ in technology, the markets, green tech and more.

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