If you have to stay home this summer, you can still see the world. Switch on your computer and dare to travel via the internet. Heavenly places, historical monuments, the best museums in the world…they are all just a click away. Take a seat and travel from home.
Google Street View. A classic. Choose a destination and start walking through its streets, taking in the monuments and the landscapes, and without running the risk of getting run over while looking at a building in awe. Who hasn’t done this already? It can also help you decide where to go on your next holiday. Popular tourist routes like the Way of St James have already been googlefied.
Geoguessr. If adventure and the excitement of travelling aimlessly are what floats your boat, start playing. You can play against yourself, play online, or challenge your friends. The game leaves you somewhere in the world and you have to guess where you are using the visual information that Google gives you. Be careful – it’s addictive!
From camera to camera. EarthCam is a website which makes it easy to find cameras that stream live from all over the world. From Alaska to New Zealand, you can find every kind of place here. It also offers videos, like spectacular sunrise and sunset time lapses from right across the globe.
Google Art Project. If you love art but you hate the queues and crowds at big museums (and even more so when you’re on holiday), we recommend falling back on Google again. On the Art Project, you will find tens of thousands of works of art from the most important galleries in the world scanned in super high resolution, including works from the Metropolitan in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, and the Museo del Prado in Madrid. You can also visit some of the rooms as if you were really there, as well as monuments like the Palace of Versailles.
The tourist sector signs up for VR and AR. Head into your travel agent to book your next holiday and when you leave you’ll already have seen the main monuments of the city and your hotel room thanks to some virtual reality goggles. That’s the path that the sector is heading down, taking advantage of the benefits of virtual reality. Destiny has developed a virtual holiday including lots of scenery from La Rioja, such as the Valdezcaray ski resort.
To infinity… and beyond. If space appeals to you but you don’t have the $250,000 that these trips will cost, NASA is offering a virtual tour of the Moon, while the European Space Agency provides a virtual visit to the International Space Station. You can also see the images that it transmits live from its webcam 400km above the Earth’s surface.
