360TourGuiding: Towards Virtual Reality Training for Tour Guiding

Paper in proceeding, 2022

Tour guiding plays an important role in turning sightseeing tours into memorable experiences. Tour guides, especially inexperienced ones, must practice intensively to perfect their craft. It is key that guides acquire knowledge about sights, in-situ presentation skills, and perfection ability to interact with and engage tourists. Therefore, tour-guide education requires on-site training at the place of interest including live tourist audiences. However, for modest budgets, such setups are costly and tourism students have to practice tour guiding at home or in simulated class-room setups. It has become a challenge for students to adequately prepare themselves for jobs in terms of relevant knowledge and skills. To tackle this problem, we propose 360TourGuiding, a VR system enabling its users to practice tour guiding with 360 travel videos plus the attendance of remote audiences participating through their mobile and personal device. This paper reports on the concept, on our design, current implementation, and on a pilot study with the current 360TourGuiding prototype. Based on qualitative feedback gained through the pilot study, we discuss possible system improvements, future system updates, and plans for empirical evaluation.