JONATHAN CHENMTM Group
He karapitipitinga mariko – Immersive regenerative tourism experiences in Aotearoa, is a technology-supported ‘new’ tourism, to radically transform the sector to respond to the risks and challenges as well as enormous opportunities it faces.
The Opportunity
Tourism is emerging from a global crisis. While tourism operators are negotiating the immediate effects of a global pandemic, systemic issues that emerged before the current crisis remain.
Post- pandemic tourism must be more sustainable and resilient, while limiting and reversing damage caused to fragile cultural and natural heritage and their kaitiaki. There will be no return to the ‘old tourism’.
The current crisis offers both the challenge and the opportunity to build a ‘new’ regenerative tourism model.
Science Excellence
Using the research team’s interdisciplinary experience, we focus on novel interactive and immersive live tourism experiences that can be jointly experienced with others regardless of location – either virtually being there or by augmenting the experience when physically visiting tourism sites, in ways that can complement the existing tourism offering and provide new commercial opportunities, as well as solve access issues and associated inequalities.
We explore the relevance of our technology-supported ‘new’ tourism to achieve our goal in terms of broadly defined regenerative tourism outcomes.
The key scientific problems are:
Understanding virtual tourism's role for Māori communities and the contribution to a sustainable tourism sector.
Live capture, sharing, and display of complex cultural and natural heritage sites.
Interactions and engagement between virtually co-located visitors and tour guides.
The key hypotheses are:
He karapitipitinga mariko provides transformative tourist experiences of/in Aotearoa that are enduring (i.e., regenerative tourism outcomes including conservation and cultural awareness)
He karapitipitinga mariko benefits Māori communities contributing to economic, environmental, social, and cultural wellbeing.
He karapitipitinga mariko creates virtual engagement and remote “being there” experience when virtually travelling
He karapitipitinga mariko enhances the experience when physically travelling by sharing and augmenting experiences.
THE PROJECT PARTNERS
OUR PROJECT FUNDER
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) awarded a five-year Endeavour Research Programme to the University of Otago and partner organisations.
