The Immersive Tour of Ancient Egypt: Horizon of Khufu

Immersive tours have become a reality and I guess it's the most likely way I am ever going to stand at the top of the great pyramid of Cairo. Somewhat by chance, I ended up taking this immersive tour of Ancient Egypt while visiting Xi'an, the Chinese city famous for its Terracotta Warriors. Yes I was in an ancient Chinese capital but I was not about to go and see real history, it was the fake sort I was looking for and boy did I get it. 

The tour is a family friendly virtual tour that takes place within a huge warehouse. To drag people in they do have to construct some cat statues and Egyptian style decorations. I guess the kid would be climbing up it and sliding down its back without the barrier in place. Kids don't really need virtual tours: they can find fun in the here and now.

You receive a headset that is clamped on and it does not admit any light from the outside. You are now seeing only what the headset shows you. It is disorienting at first, you cannot fully trust it and imagine you are going to bump into someone or something but with a little time you get used to it. You have to walk through actual space to make the image you are looking at appear as if you are walking through the temple or whichever exotic location it is serving you up with.

I was on a small boat gliding along the Nile and I seem to remember a cat and a tour guide accompanying me too. You don't have to look at them all the time but they are present. There is sound too, flutes and water, the tour guide talking... in Chinese. The sound also seemed to be  stereo so that when you turned your head it's position in the stereo mix changed - this made it seem as if the sound was outside of you and in the space. Nice touch. The visual aspect of the tour was quite complete yet at the same time also somewhat kitsch. It looked like a video game that started out with a big image but which then needed to continually top the last scene and so descended into special effects which broke the spell completely. To get a better sense of the imagery I'd suggest looking at their demo video on their website https://www.excurio.com/en/horizon-of-khufu/ 

This is what the scene looks like in the cold light of day. A group with their headsets on shuffling their way through the black and white empty space. Interestingly, I noticed there is a walking route which the virtual tour follows. Part 1 moves to one area and the group is then navigated to the next scene in another part of the space. This is a touring virtual tour (it can be presented in different cities) so I would imagine the host venue has to be large enough to accommodate this choreography.

When I pulled off my headset to compare the pyramids with the real space I saw before me a mass of geometric patters, black, white and grey. At first I thought these were just street art but having seen how the technology plots the space I now start to wonder if these play a functional role in spatial plotting. It is a distinct design one way or another. I was at this point in the tour more interested in the mechanics because the content had sort of exhausted itself and the form was no longer a novelty.   

What's more, the technology froze at one point and I got a tap on the shoulder from the staff who had to reset the program. The tour sort of works but the tech is not quite seamless yet. This was the most interesting aspect of it, it be honest, as the content was like a run of the mill video game. This is clearly an expensive and cutting edge touristic experience and they need to make their money back. That's why it cannot be too artistic or obscure. These immersive tours will only become more widespread and the technical aspects will surely improve but the concepts, narratives and interactivity all end up being put somewhat aside. If these are to really make a breakthrough they will need to better integrate these issues or else they will remain a novelty item like 3D cinema.

The Japanese Interval Walk

The tours that I tend to write about tend to be about something. That is to say, they have a subject, a route, a way of navigating you along it and something to impart along the way. That's pretty standard. There is, however, another angle I haven't paid so much attention to so far: how to walk. Walking can be understood as an action in its own right and there are a great many people who come at it with different points of interest. Japanese Interval Walking is a case in point. It is enjoying a moment in the spotlight as people are looking into the health benefits it allegedly confers.

It is a form of interval training whereby you mix intensive walking with relaxed walking: you switch between the two every three minutes and keep this up for half an hour. I had recently got myself some new shoes that actually fit me, no mean feat here in Zhuhai, if you pardon the pun. Booted and suited with phone in hand, I tried interval walking in my local neighborhood cutting a course through the park and old town. It was not particularly difficult to do, I practically sped walked a marathon once (OK I ran a bit, too) so this was a much smaller ask. This ease might indeed be part of its appeal: it doesn't place too great a strain on anything. 

What is unique about it is the switching of pace and to do this you need to keep one eye on the clock so you are rarely 100% present in the place itself. The park was simply the container for this activity to happen, chosen mainly for its lack of cars. That makes me wonder about empty spaces and how far the idea of a flat void designed purely for walking could be taken. It might be interesting to go into such a space, if one exists. I tried walking in the desert, once, but that was something else, it turned out to be anything but empty. 

There were a few people out and about when I sped off arms swinging and bum wiggling. I was slightly concerned I might look odd power walking at pace then idling about. They have seen far worse, however, and to be honest I have myself been guilty of far more attention grabbing stunts, so this illogical walk didn't seem to trouble anyone. 

The video that my phone automatically generated clearly shows the changes in pace. It's surprising the amount of detail contained in this and that is a takeaway in itself. I am familiar with people spelling out words and marking shapes through GPS route mapping; this level of animation is the next step. There must be some spin off use for this.

It strikes me that it would be possible to practice interval walking on a treadmill and thus do it on the spot. There must indeed be people who prefer walking on a machine to walking in outdoor space. The interval walk might also be considered a performance in the medical understanding of the term. If I were to have the right equipment to test blood pressure, pulse, weight and so on, I would be able to assess the efficiency of the walk in terms of health criteria such as calories expended or blood pressure change and so on. If I needed to do that, I could see myself doing interval walking regularly but that seems to me an overly narrow frame to place around walking. 

Call me old fashioned but I am happier with finding new reasons, new narratives and new places to walk. New, or should I say, alternative ways of walking might, however, offer ways to achieve some of these so it is still worth paying more attention to how we walk. I remember having come across walking as a means of meditation, of focussing, of letting go or of socializing, for instance. Some research will surely upturn a great many more. 

Make China Great Again Tour

The US has its MAGA movement, lead by their current president, which might be described as playing to a myth of national revival. I'm not interested here to what extent that is hyperbole, I simply want to start by noting how powerful a force it is. Similarly, the UK has its Golden Age that gets endlessly recycled in costume dramas and which, it could be argued, played a role in Brexit and its aftermath: take back control! China has something similar: a two pronged fork with the revival of traditional culture on one side and the championing of innovative industries on the other.

This performance took the form of a short tour from point A to point B: From Huawei to KFC. Conventional wisdom might imagine the journey should be the other way around; you start by copying lower quality foreign goods and finish by manufacturing your own high quality products. That is of course the model. The reality is a little more complicated. You, and I don't simply mean China here, I'm thinking of revivals more generally, you start with your culture and you construct a self-serving version of it that never really was. The final result is often somewhat kitsch, watch any Chinese costume drama or better still time travel drama for in these we truly get the contemporary eye. 

This tour was given quickly so as to avoid interference with security guards. Not that it was breaking any rules in particular, but experience has taught me that ambiguity is not something that security guards deal in and when there is a foreigner involved, it can get complicated. This was a get in get out sort of tour for a small group, delivered without any sort of framing dialogue. None was needed. 

Ways To Wander: Google the name...

I was on the lookout for tours to take and, coming up a blank in my local vicinity, I thought it better to take matters into my own hand. I looked in the book Ways To Wander which is a collection of proposals for walks, the majority of which come from walking artists, whatever that term precisely means. I selected number 28: Google the Name... a walk written by Blake Morris. It goes like this: 

The problems began right away. As I am in China, Google Maps does not work properly. There is both an effort to block it and it is not regularly updated. When I searched for my neighborhood of Tangjia it didn't offer a clear choice and some of the options were placed in the sea. This brings up the issue of efficient mapping being a precondition for prosecuting an effective war, trade or otherwise. I heard the Chinese equivalent service Baiduu Map doesn't work properly in the US.

The places it suggested were quite definitely not the centre of Tangjia and the centre of the screen was a mountainous park next to Zhongshan University. Plan B was needed.

I switched to Baidu Map which didn't give me the satisfaction of a pin, either, so I had to zoom in and mark a crude X on the centre of what it said was Tangjia. I studied the digital map carefully as I would not have access to the phone once I set off. It seemed to be in a place I hadn't been to before.

The walk to the centre of Tangjia was more focussed than a typical walk. Having a purpose, a destination and no phone to distract you from the here and now, is a good condition to think about how the software came up with this destination. I imagined satellites in the sky above assisting this mapping. A near full moon shone brightly too, it was a clear warm night. The stars were somehow on my side.

When I came to what I thought was the centre of the map I saw a single lane road with houses on either side of the two high walls which lined it. I walked back and forth surveying it carefully and according to my estimate the centre of Tangjia is one of two places. It is either a tree with long, green shiny leaves that hang over the once white two-meter wall or it is the hand-written sign that sits a meter or two to its left. The sign read: 美女上門 and underneath, a telephone number. It was an ad for call girls. 

I made my way along the road and weaved through a residential area till it came to a bustling evening street with shops open late and people still eating. I had to reflect that the location I was sent to was not where I would have placed the centre of Tangjia. When I saw both this lively road and the tower blocks under construction nearby, I had to reconsider: maybe the centre was indeed further south, maybe even around here. 

We all seem to live in our bubbles with our own conception of the city and if this walk did one good thing it was to merge the virtual and real spaces by inviting me to view one from the perspective of the other. In doing so, I could see how the neighborhood is viewed with quite different centers of gravity. This was only reinforced as I walked back past a new live house where a local pop band were playing and a long line of teenagers were waiting to get in and see their idols.

A final thing that I realized when I got home is that while I hadn't looked at the phone, it had been recording my footsteps all the same. I'm trying to walk around 10,000 a day, as that is healthy. This tour didn't quite take me there but that's largely my fault for not braving the sticky sauna of daytime Zhuhai earlier in the day. I shall try a few more walks from this collection and review them here.

The Pink Tour of Shanghai

I wanted to take a tour of Shanghai and all the conventional ones seemed a bit boring so I decided to make my own: The Pink Tour of Shanghai.

It is quite a simple exercise, which I sometimes give my students. Choose a colour and then follow it from point to point, wherever it leads you.

I took a picture of each of the pink colored entities that was pulling me towards it.

I discovered something as I was doing this. The colour pink is mostly used in women's clothing and relatively little elsewhere.

This therefore lead me sort of by default onto the middle aged ladies of Shanghai tour. This group were queuing to try and catch a glimpse of a celebrity.

Elsewhere pink lead me to objects used by women.

One thing particular about it then was that most of the pink was mobile. Grey stays put whereas pink is on the move. I had never really thought about how mobile various colors are before.

I followed an energetic older lady but she went into building so I left her. I looked around and found a new pink target.

The delivery bike was too fast for me to catch it but it did take me a distance whereas most other pinks just took me a short way.

Sometimes the distance was quite great but as long as I remained focussed on the pink target I was good.

I finally got taken to a building but it was a building for fashion and it was closed for renovation.

I was starting to wonder if this pattern of following middle-aged ladies was going to ever break and when the right moment to stop would be.

I then got taken to another building, this time an open one.

It was a mall. I stepped inside and saw a lady with a light pink bag and followed her.

It was a bit tricky deciding what is and isn't pink; some pinks are on the edge of pink: they are too pale or are mixed with oranges and reds, not pure pink but still pink enough for me.

These flowers are one such example.

That's when I realized that the mall as a whole was pink by design.

The woman who I had followed had just walked clean through the mall without stopping, for her it was an air conditioned street. For me it was a pink paradise.

Strawberries are not red they are pink!  

 

And then the LED lighting changed colour and dropped the pink illuminating the space with a colder white light. I was left in a corner of the mall with no pink in view. It was time to stop, I had had my pink tour. This changing of colour was disconcerting and reminded me of another mall I had been in the day before which had put all the signage onto LED screens which also carried ads. If you needed to find the exit or the toilets you had to stare at ads for thirty seconds first. 

Doing this colour themed tour with a different colour would result in a very different sort of experience and lead me through a distinct set of spaces. I remember, for example, once doing this with red in China. The difficulty is really in maintaining concentration and allowing the experience to unfold rather than directing it too deliberately. It's more difficult than it looks.