Best Virtual Tours of Asia to Experience from Home
In these days of quarantine lockdowns and restrictions on international travel, the only way for many people to see the world is via virtual travel on their desktops, laptops, tablets or smartphones. It is often said that virtual travel is the next best thing when you can’t physically travel, but many so-called virtual travel sites are nothing more than still photo galleries, and are not particularly exciting for armchair travellers.
For many years, live streaming sites have been a way of providing people with a remote eye on the world. In Asia, the Japanese were pioneers in this field, setting up more than 40 webcams around Mt Fuji so that it could be viewed from all angles. But the images on sites like Fujisan Watcher or Fujigoko TV were either tiny or grainy and have not improved much to this day. Those on the Fujisan Watcher site can’t be viewed on tablets or smartphones.
Nevertheless, one of the webcams on the Fujigoko site has been viewed nearly 28 million times since 1998. Other live cameras around Tokyo such as one providing a 360° view of the city from the top of Tokyo Tower, and another monitoring the Shibuya Scramble – a busy pedestrian crossing in the middle of the city – have received millions of views too.
Opentopia is a popular webcam streaming platform but has only a few webcams connected in Asia in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. The only camera that gets many views in this part of the world is the one at the Monkey Walk at Kanba in Japan. But there’s nothing much of interest to travellers there.
Earthcam offers a much better selection of webcams in Asia. You can view what’s happening on various beaches in Asia like Boracay’s famous White Beach in the Philippines, and in temples in some countries too, but unless there is something happening like a festival, they probably won’t hold your attention for long.
For those interested in wild animals, Explore.org has live webcams right around the world, but again not many in Asia. Their live feeds from the panda yards at Wolong Grove in China are popular though, and at night when the cameras are off, highlights of the webcam feeds during the day are played back.
Google Arts & Culture
About eight years ago, Google took the first steps towards providing a more engaging virtual travel experience by entering into collaborations with museums and art galleries around the world to photograph the exhibits inside those institutions so that they could be viewed from anywhere in the world. The Hong Kong Art Museum was one of the first places to be included in Asia.
Since then, other museums like the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and Tokyo National Museum have joined the scheme and have leapfrogged the so-called ‘Art View’ technology of the early joiners. Google now uses 360° high definition panoramic cameras similar in design to those that the company uses for its Street View images on Google Maps.
Now known as Google Arts & Culture, the platform has more than 2,000 arts and cultural institutions around the world which can be explored through panoramic images or 360° videos on either desktops or laptops. With tablets and smartphones, they can be viewed through a Google Arts & Culture app.
The Google Arts & Culture tours work best on a desktop or laptop. To explore one of the partnering institutions, go to the website and then click on the search (magnifying glass) symbol in the top right of the page, enter the name of the museum or art gallery that you are interested to view, and if that institution has partnered with Google, its name will show up in the search results. Click on the name to be taken to the landing page for that institution, then click on the Street View symbol (a little man in a circle) in the bottom right hand corner of the header image. That will take you into the virtual tour.
The Google Arts & Culture platform also has many travel galleries focusing on tourist destinations of historical or cultural interest. However, finding them on the site can be a challenge as they can often only be found through the search function using the correct spelling of the site. The browse functions of the travel section are fairly hit and miss.
Another problem with the travel destinations on the Google Arts & Culture Street View platform is that the 360° panoramas were sometimes taken in bad weather, which degraded the quality of the high definition panoramas. It gives the impression that the Google technicians were working to tight schedules and did not have the time to hang around for good weather to arrive.
For those interested in virtual tours of travel destinations rather than cultural sites, there is a much better option to Google, and that’s a Russian company called AirPano.
AirPano
Like Google Arts & Culture, AirPano uses high definition 360° videos and panoramas to provide viewers with the closest possible feeling of being at the destination – short of being there in person.
In fact, in many of the AirPano panoramas, the viewer will see more detail of the place through their computers than being there in person because the panoramas are shot from different altitudes, as well as from the ground. And it is clear from the quality of the images that AirPano’s photographers spent a lot of time at each site to shoot in the best possible weather conditions.
AirPano is not a pure travel site as such. It is essentially a commercial sales site for a team of professional videographers and photographers specialising in 360° video and high definition panoramic still images. They produce drone videos and stock photos of what they describe as “the most interesting places on earth” for governments, the travel trade and other commercial businesses. But the very high-quality content on the site is available for casual visitors to view, and it provides some of the best virtual tours of both well-known and out-of-the-way places in Asia.
There are also concise and well-researched articles on each place being photographed. A good one to start with on the AirPano site is the panorama of the Taj Mahal in India. You can zoom in and out, and switch to other panoramas taken from different sides of the Taj Mahal and from different altitudes.
Another fascinating series of Indian panoramas on the AirPano site are those of the Varanasi Ghats. There are aerial panoramas from several altitudes, ‘helicopter’ shots of nearby mosques, close-ups of some of the ancient buildings fronting the Ghats, and panoramas taken among the crowds of people bathing in the River Ganges.
AirPano has done a lot of work in China too, and some of the panoramas they have shot there are very impressive. Start with the ones around Guilin for a taste, and then head over to Zhangjiajie to have a look at the shots of the glass bridge over the massive gorge there. The Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge panoramas have a lot of fine detail in them, so if you are not on a fast computer, you may find some of the rendering becomes fuzzy.
If you are interested in more out-of-the-way places, then check out AirPano’s panoramas of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. That’s a part of Asia that rarely sees any travellers from overseas (AirPano mislabels it as being in Europe, but it is most definitely in Asia). This windswept wilderness area is home to more sea lions than human beings.
AirPano gives travellers the opportunity to visit parts of Asia that most of us will never get to – places like the isolated and rugged mountain ranges of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – but if it’s pure beauty that you are looking for, then check out the galleries of 360° panoramas of Indonesia and the Maldives. There are some incredibly beautiful places among those.
For those interested in archaeology, the Jordan gallery on AirPano includes a very impressive collection of panoramas of Petra. There are also smaller galleries of panoramas of Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm in Cambodia.
AirPano also features 360° videos on its site. These are videos during which you can select your own viewpoint using a mouse when watching them on a desktop or laptop. They work on tablets and smartphones too if you watch them via the YouTube app and use your finger to change the viewpoint (but they don’t look as impressive as on a desktop or laptop). Try their aerial video of Bhutan to get a feel of how they work. The detail in the 360° videos is not as good as in the 360° panoramas, but of course you will see more of the destinations in the videos.
YouVisit and 360cities
Probably the next best site for virtual tours after AirPano is YouVisit. Its panoramic images are generally close to the quality of those on AirPano and some good examples can be seen in their China Tour gallery which includes the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Bund in Shanghai, the Great Wall at Huanghuacheng, and the Jing’an Temple in Shanghai.
YouVisit also offers 360° videos but they are not of the same quality as those on AirPano. Check out their Vietnam tour for a sample. YouVisit promotes its 360° videos as “virtual reality experiences” but they are not really virtual reality. True virtual reality – or VR as it is known – requires the use of special headsets, and the cost of producing 3D content is much higher than for 360° videos.
Travel is only a relatively small part of YouVisit’s business model. It focuses primarily on providing virtual tours of real estate and educational institutions. It was recently acquired by a US company specialising in enrolment services for colleges and universities. At the present time it is not known whether YouVisit will continue making travel videos.
360cities is another website that offers curated collections of panoramic images from around the world, but most are shot from ground level and the quality nowhere near as high as on the AirPano site. But there are some fascinating 360° panoramas of Iran, Pakistan and Sri Lanka worth checking out on 360cities. None of those countries are represented on AirPano.
And there are some interesting panoramas of Mongolia as well. AirPano only has shots of the capital, Ulaanbaatar (but very good ones at that). If you are looking for a warmer destination, then 360cities has a lot of galleries of the Maldives as well. Check out their panoramic image of the TMA Sea Plane Terminal for a start.
The 360cities website still promotes viewing of its content through smartphones and the Google Cardboard throwaway headsets for a more immersive virtual reality experience. But most VR experts say the experience is more of a gimmick than true VR, and that the Google Cardboard ‘technology’ is on the way out.
Drone videos
Although not offering as much of an immersive experience as 360° videos, drone videos are another way to get a bird’s eye view of many interesting places in Asia. Most of these are available on video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. Peter Tong’s complete circumnavigation of Hong Kong Island is a popular one. It takes 33 minutes to complete the circumnavigation of the island and is accompanied by a relaxing piece of Chinese orchestral music – the Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto.
If you are looking for shorter cityscape experiences, then check out this video of Singapore (5 mins) or this one of Dubai (4 mins). The latter includes some impressive shots of the Arabian Desert outside the city boundaries. When you click through to these videos, you’ll see plenty of other videos of Asian city destinations in the right-hand sidebar.
My personal favourite drone video is this one of Guilin and Yangshou in China. It reminds me of a very relaxing cycling holiday that I had there many years ago. It’s only three and a half minutes long but full of interesting things to see. You’ll want to put this region on your bucket list after watching this, if you’ve not already been there.
Another interesting one from China is a drone video of ancient Fenghuang town shot by Stef Hoffer in 2016. It’s another for the bucket list if you’ve not visited Fenghuang before, but it’s difficult to see how the local tourism authorities will be able to maintain social distancing there.
When you are on the YouTube and Vimeo sites, you will come across many videos that are a combination of both drone and edited video footage. Some of these are excellent productions. Check out Aren Goodman’s video of Coron in the Philippines as an example. It’s been watched over half a million times. Another impressive one on Vimeo is The World Travel Guy’s video of Java, Sulawesi and Bali. You’ll love the aerial waterfall shots.
Virtual tours utilising 360° panoramic photos and videos will never replace the experience of real travel, but whilst we are restricted as to where we can go, they provide a modicum of relief from the boredom of being confined within our own borders. And who knows, you might gain some new ideas as to where to plan travel post-coronavirus times.
