XploreRide is using extended reality (XR) to take tourists on XR-driven immersive adventure bus tours of Honolulu.
In the tours, tourists board a real bus and then use mixed reality headsets to view immersive imagery of Honolulu’s top attractions like Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head. The XR tech blends physical cultural landscapes with digital environments.
As the tour bus approaches a place like Diamond Head, the tourists wearing headsets can see the place with their own eyes but they can also see a virtual eruption with lava on the screens. The tourists can also view a hidden underwater city where real and digital worlds merge.
Since February, the tour company has been running tours and it provides virtual reality headsets to as many as 40 tourists. Once they put on the headsets, the tourists are guided by an “Ancestral Spirit Aumakua” as they explore Hawaii’s natural beauty and collect Mana stones.
H.I.S., a publicly traded tourism company in Japan, runs the tours with the creative company Naked, which is in charge of planning, staging, and production. Synesthesias, an IT venture from the University of Tokyo, is providing the next-generation XR technology “RideVision” for the EV bus.
H.I.S. has also partnered with Roberts Hawaii, the only company in Hawaii with a fleet of large electric vehicle (EV) buses, to create a “zero-emission” tour that eliminates carbon dioxide while on the road, and will donate a portion of the tour proceeds to the Waikiki Aquarium, which focuses on research and conservation of Hawaii’s coral reef and marine ecosystem.
Takuma Kozaiwa, general manager at H.I.S. Americas, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the goal is to educate people through an immersive adventure through Honolulu’s top attractions.
“We have this exciting new project called the Xploreride, which is a next-generation travel experience. It reimagines the way travelers interact with the local destination that makes it so immersive and rich and also fun for the family as well,” said Kozaiwa. “When it comes to the content that we have in Hawaii, it is family friendly content with certain gamification elements that are part of the tourism experience.”
Whether they’re in Hawaii or thousands of miles away, participants can explore a hidden underwater city where real and digital worlds merge.
The team uses HTC Vive headsets for the experience, said Masakazu Kobayashi, special project manager at H.I.S. Americas.
The electric bus goes on a 40-minute tour in Waikiki. Travelers hop on the bus and put ona head-mounted display where they can see the XR experience as well as real-life tourism sites as well.
“The virtual content that gives them a hybrid experience that makes it so enriching. There are certain things that virtual can recreate that makes the experience so rich,” said Kozaiwa.
As an example, going back in time isn’t possible on a tour. But the headset visualizes historical material like a volcano eruption, Kozaiwa said.
“Although we can see the beautiful sites, especially in Hawaii, there’s so much content there but we can’t really interact with the historical elements that are there,” Kozaiwa said. “The virtual components can make that happen, as well as also re-create things like a volcano eruption.”
The idea isn’t to take away your attention from the natural beauty of the places you’re visiting. You can take the headset off when you want to. But there’s also more you can learn about the place through the VR experience, he said.
The team took about a half a year to come up with the idea and put it into action. Early on, the team wanted to make the bus store so engaging and immersive, but they didn’t have the right technology to make it happen.
Kobayashi said his team was at CES 2024 and met with Synesthesias, the tech firm from the University of Tokyo, which provided a way to synchronize real-time data streams at once. That allowed all the passengers to see the same thing at the same time, even if a vehicle was moving at varying speeds. The tour stays in sync with each tourist and as it passes the right spots on the tour.
“This alignment between visual cues and physical sensation eliminates sensory mismatch which is the primary cause of motion sickness,” Kozaiwa said. “The system enables immersive experiences inside a moving vehicle with minimal discomfort.”
“We found the right technology, the right content partners and the storyline all made sense,” he said.
Tourists using the headsets need to be seven years or older for safety reasons because of the weight of the headset. The tours last for about 30 or 40 minutes. Part of the reason is that most people don’t want to wear a VR headset for much longer than that.
“We wanted to limit the duration of the headset to be on the humans for under one hour, which is the suggested health guidance, given the weight of the headset,” Kozaiwa said.
The prices for the tours range from $10 to $50. Over time, Xploreride hopes to go to new cities and create new experiences for tourists, whether it’s on boats or other vehicles.
One of those cities will be New York, where an experiential tour bus will drive through Manhattan with an AR experience starting in May. It’s similar in concept to Hawaii, with a Top View (double-decker) bus will take tourists and New Yorkers around the Times Square area. Their VR headsets will reveal a spate of cool visuals including what Manhattan looked like in the early 1900s. An animated Statue of Liberty is used as a tour guide to explain various historical facts and landmarks.
“We are hoping to expand the team, particularly as we go into a new city,” Kozaiwa said. “We’ll continue to partner with the right technology companies.”