In this COVID-19 era traditional tourism is no longer possible. If the World can't come to New Zealand, one solution is to use technology to bring New Zealand to the World. We showed how Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology can be used to capture and share tourism experiences anywhere in the world. This creates a new type of tourism where people can pop into New Zealand after dinner for a remote experience rather than spend hours on a plane. It also enables new business models that could generate significant revenue for Tourism operators.

This webinar provided an overview of the New Zealand Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and eXtended Reality (XR) industry and also our academic research and capabilities in these areas. We examine our unique strengths in the context of the Global industry and explore how international leaders in the field view our performance and our researchers. The New Zealand AR/VR/XR Market Report was written by Professor Mark Billinghurst from the Auckland Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland for the NZ Government Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and focuses on providing recommendations for the AR/VR/XR industry and research sectors which could contribute to New Zealand's economic productivity and business growth.

By combining VR/AR, 360 cameras and other sensors, we can digitally capture and stream the world around us in real-time, allowing anyone to virtually teleport to a location to collaborate and communicate with others, as though they were there in person. We call this immersive telepresence experience Augmented Virtual Teleportation (AVT).In this talk, we introduced the AVT system, give you a sense of what its like to experience it, and discussed its potential impact for New Zealand. The session concluded with a Q&A panel featuring the speakers and other VRAR experts on the team.The future of remote collaboration needs to adapt for the situational context - from disaster relief, virtual cinema, tele-medicine, to architecture - seeing, feeling and experience first hand using virtual teleportation can make the critical difference. Unlike video conferencing, AVT hopes to capture a 360 view of your surroundings and whole-body gestures, allowing a more natural way to communicate and work together.