At the "Fly Over China" cinema in the Chinese Communist Party History Exhibition Hall, visitors board a "flying machine" and overlook the vast expanse of China; at the Changbai Mountain Legendary Flight Experience Hall in Jilin Province, they soar through clouds and mist, overlooking mountains and rivers and experiencing the four seasons; at the teamLab Borderless art space in Beijing, they experience images that can be "heard" and notes that can be "seen"; at the SoReal Huanzhen Pingyao Science and Art Museum in Shanxi Province, they witness the land of Sanjin in different time and space; at the Chang'an Twelve Hours Street in Shaanxi Province, they become trendy Tang Dynasty people... Since this year, the accelerated development of digital technology has accelerated the development of immersive leisure formats, becoming an important force in cultivating new formats and driving cultural and tourism consumption.

To further promote the deep integration and innovative development of digital technology and the tourism industry, create new digital cultural tourism products, formats, and scenarios, and enhance the new driving force of the cultural tourism economy, in August this year, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced the first batch of national pilot projects for the cultivation of new immersive experience spaces in smart tourism. The 24 pilot projects rely on tourist attractions, resorts, leisure streets, industrial heritage, museums, and other venues or related spaces. They utilize digital technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, and integrate cultural creativity elements. Through the integration of culture and tourism and the combination of virtual and real, they allow tourists to deeply participate in and interact with the experience, forming new tourism products and consumption scenarios.

Since its opening at the end of last year, the teamLab Borderless art space has received approximately 400,000 visitors and generated revenue exceeding 80 million yuan. During the Spring Festival alone, it received 17,000 visitors, and the average daily number of visitors during the summer vacation reached 3,000. As a permanent digital art space, teamLab not only showcases more than 40 digital art works that are global premieres and Asian premieres, but also creatively develops a series of derivative digital art spaces such as an immersive teahouse, an art restaurant, and a painting factory. Wang Dong, CEO of Guangyu Light and general manager of teamLab Borderless art space, introduced that digital technology plays an important role in this space. For example, workstations provide tools for digital creation and editing for the design, production, and debugging of artworks; the use of laser projectors can project artworks onto various complex spatial surfaces; and sensor devices are used to capture the movements of the audience or changes in the environment, enabling interaction between the audience and the artworks.

Tourist Wan Cheng said after experiencing it: "The works created in teamLab's Beijing exhibition space have no physical boundaries, creating a super immersive experience."

As the first immersive Tang Dynasty market culture and life street in the country, since its opening, the Chang'an Twelve Hours themed street has received an average of 7,000 visitors per day, a cumulative number of visitors exceeding 1 million, and a total online exposure of 7.5 billion times. With its outstanding achievements, the Chang'an Twelve Hours themed street has boosted the confidence of the cultural tourism industry and the market enthusiasm of Xi'an's cultural tourism economy.

The street integrates the TV series "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" IP and Tang Dynasty cultural elements into 24,000 square meters of commercial space, creating a new consumption scene that combines Tang Dynasty space exploration, Tang Dynasty street life experience, themed immersive interaction, Tang Dynasty music and dance performances, and cultural social leisure, recreating the unique charm of the Tang Dynasty capital Chang'an. Lu Tao, deputy secretary of the Party Committee and general manager of Shaanxi Cultural Investment Group, introduced that the Chang'an Twelve Hours themed street follows the principles of cultural reproduction, economic release, and immersive experience in its development. The street uses performing arts, scenes, NPC interaction, and a visual operation management platform built using the Internet of Things, mobile internet, artificial intelligence, and big data to achieve intelligent and visual management.

The emergence of immersive experience spaces means that tourist attractions are no longer just areas for viewing natural landscapes, historical sites, and immovable cultural relics, but have also become creative spaces for in-depth experiences and new commercial formats, such as travel photography, role-playing, and script killing, becoming popular consumption business districts and platform entrances. Zhang Lingyun, professor at Beijing International Studies University and executive editor of Tourism Journal, said.

In Shanxi, the SoReal Pingyao Science and Art Museum, transformed from the former Pingyao County Cotton Mill, uses extended reality, multimedia interactive projection technology, anti-gravity fountain devices, and other technological means, combined with Pingyao's profound cultural heritage and rich human tourism resources, to recreate the prosperity of Pingyao Ancient City.

In the seven themed exhibition halls, including "Walking on the Cloud Bridge," "Light and Shadow of the Four Seasons," and "Si Shui Gui Tang," the comprehensive use of irregular projection, virtual reality, spatial audio, and lidar capture technologies has achieved the transcendence of time and space; in the dome light and shadow show area, 16 projectors are integrated into one image through fusion software and projected onto a hemispherical giant screen wall, coupled with stereo surround sound, the immersive effect is significant. "SoReal Pingyao Science and Art Museum has comprehensively enhanced the immersion, participation, and experience of tourists, further promoting Pingyao Ancient City to the international stage." Hao Juan, head of SoReal Pingyao Science and Art Museum, said.

Only Henan Drama Fantasy City integrates topic tags such as "5,000 years of Chinese civilization," "the root culture of Henan's hometown," and "Zhengzhou's railway culture" into various dramas, three-dimensionally showcasing the Yellow River civilization and interpreting the Central Plains culture. The fantasy city theater, mainly using a rotating lifting platform, outlines the unique architectural form of the "fantasy city." The train station theater's intelligent flip-boards, combined with mechanical wheat ear lifting rods, present the magnificent rolling waves of wheat through intelligent control. The Civilization Light laser projection show uses laser projection technology, combined with rammed earth walls, projection equipment, and supplemented by laser lights, wheat field fog, etc., to create a fusion. The "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" and "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" from a thousand years ago reappear before our eyes, forming a huge historical scroll.

Only Henan Drama Fantasy City is the "engine" of the cultural tourism industry in the Henan Zhengzhou-Kaifeng-Luoyang tourism belt. Its opening performance has significant demonstration and driving effects on accelerating the adjustment and upgrading of the cultural tourism industry structure in the Henan region and achieving the goal of building a strong cultural province. Jianye Group's relevant person in charge stated that being selected as a national pilot project for the cultivation of new immersive experience spaces in smart tourism further encourages Only Henan Drama Fantasy City to deeply excavate the connotation of Central Plains culture, promote the high-quality development of Henan's culture and tourism, and tell the stories of the Central Plains, the Yellow River, and China.

The organic integration of digital technology and cultural tourism spaces can effectively promote scenic areas, resorts, and leisure streets to fully utilize new technologies and methods to enrich new formats, transform and upgrade, and improve quality and efficiency. It is also an important way to promote urban renewal, strengthen cultural empowerment, and cultivate new formats and scenes of "culture + tourism".

Shanghai Disneyland's Soaring Over the Horizon project uses 4D giant screen projection technology and super-weightless spray simulation flight to transform players into thunderbirds, taking off from Adventure Island for a global flight journey, such as overlooking 13 of the world's most representative attractions, exploring every continent and ocean, and visiting iconic buildings, cities, and natural wonders around the world.

Located in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, the China Grand Canal Museum uses diverse display methods and differentiated advanced technological means to present a multi-dimensional and concentrated display of Grand Canal culture, showcasing the history and culture of the China Grand Canal in a comprehensive, all-time, and all-round manner. The space widely uses electronic sand tables, panoramic screens, projections, naked-eye 3D, infrared technology, and other multimedia technologies to construct an experience space that combines modern display and performance with ancient immersive scenes, and through the construction of a game-type education model, allows audiences to obtain personalized cultural education experiences, exploring a new path for creating digital immersive experience projects in cultural parks.

The application of emerging technologies also integrates exhibitions, displays, and performances in museums, playing a positive role in inheriting the canal civilization, telling the stories of the canal, and disseminating canal culture.

Tourist attractions are spatial places with beautiful natural ecology and humanistic landscapes or with profound cultural heritage, full of historical legends and legendary stories and atmosphere, but in the future, the most valuable aspect of tourist attractions will not only be resource endowments, but also the scenic area's self-created IPs based on resources and tens of millions of online and offline private domain traffic. Zhang Lingyun analyzed that this will become a new track for the development of smart tourism, and it is also the significance of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's launch of the pilot project for the cultivation of new immersive experience spaces in smart tourism.