About

‘He karapitipitinga mariko – Immersive regenerative tourism experiences in Aotearoa’ is an interdisciplinary project that turns challenges into opportunities, researching and enabling new forms of physical (in person) and virtual (immersive) tourism by creating augmented and extended visitor experiences that are universal and accessible.

 


The project embeds local iwi, tourism business operators, destination managers, and technology providers in partnership with world-leading researchers in the fields of tourism, indigenous studies, and virtual and augmented reality technology.

Together, we are researching and developing key prototype technologies for advancing a ‘new’ tourism model that will contribute to the transformation of the tourism sector into a sustainable, resilient and low-carbon knowledge-intensive industry with a particular focus on the Māori communities throughout Aotearoa.

Exploring Aotearoa in new ways

The focus is on novel interactive and immersive live tourism experiences that can be jointly experienced with others regardless of location – either virtually being there or by augmenting the experience when physically visiting tourism sites.

This can complement the existing tourism offering and provide new commercial opportunities, as well as solve access issues and associated inequalities.

Addressing tourism's systemic issues

While tourists, tourism operators, and destination managers are emerging from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is timely to address the serious systemic issues that were already confronting tourism.

Post-pandemic tourism must be more sustainable and resilient, while limiting and reversing damage caused to fragile cultural and natural heritage and their kaitiaki.

There will be no return to the ‘old tourism’. The current crisis offers both the challenge and the opportunity to build a new regenerative tourism model.

He karapitipitinga mariko will play a key role in addressing challenges of an industry that contributed more than 10% to GDP in 2019.

Creating a new and sustainable tourism model

Virtual and mixed-reality technologies will be used to:

  • Enable tourism without travel
  • Enhance local-based tourism
  • Reduce carbon emissions from international travel
  • Open up environmentally sensitive areas in a safe manner
  • Allow tangata whenua to be in control of how their knowledge is shared

Social, cultural, and environmental sustainability

We aim to innovate the sector and build a tourism future that is economically more productive and resilient. It will empower communities that are disproportionately affected by unsustainable tourism.

Our work will enhance tourism's social, cultural and environmental sustainability, and will capture memories that last long after the physical experience of the destination has ended.

This project is funded by a MBIE Endeavour Fund.

Project Themes

We work in an interdisciplinary field covering a wide range of themes:

  • Engagement, aspirations, experiences and applications
  • Innovation in technology for the future generations
  • Creating virtual engagement and remote ‘being there’ experiences
  • Augmenting and sharing touristic physical "being there" experiences

Team Members

Our interdisciplinary team consists of members from Otago, Massey, Canterbury, Griffith, Victoria and Auckland universities, as well as industry partners.

Research Themes

Theme - Engagement, aspirations, experiences and applications

Our research follows the principles of tourism development based on inclusive and equitable approaches.

Effective collaboration with case study businesses, key partners (mana whenua, hapū and iwi), and stakeholders (local communities, key government agencies) ensures that the strategic goals of the research are co-designed, with consideration of ethical issues.



Technologies that have been developed and tested in the lab will be assessed in terms of the impacts on the experiences of local and remote participants, across the spatially and temporally extended stages of the visitor experience.

Participatory approaches will be developed to assess all stages of the visitor experience, across different visitor ‘types’ (virtual, latent and actual) in relation to:
  • Technology experiences (‘being there’)
  • Intra/inter-personal experiences (co-presence)
  • Visitor engagement with natural/cultural heritage
  • Transformative experiences

Theme - Innovation in technology for the future generations

Tourism, and Māori tourism, has been significantly impacted by Covid 19. As a result, many Māori businesses, iwi and hapū have had to reshape many of their priorities in terms of its cultural wealth, authenticity, and environmental and economic sustainability.

To explore the economic, health, environmental, social, and cultural potential of immersive and collaborative AR/VR technologies for multiple stakeholders, mātauranga experts, iwi and hapū, we utilise a Kaupapa Māori model using a thought space wānanga approach to engage with these Māori groups and communities.

Our research team already have developed long-term relationships with knowledge holders, community leaders, hapū and iwi and these relationships that have been forged over years will now enable high-quality co-design, discussion and mātauranga collection to investigate how these priorities have been shaped and informed from a te ao Māori perspective.

Theme - Creating virtual engagement and remote ‘being there’ experiences

To effectively deliver rich user experiences that showcase Māori culture and the natural environment, technologies enabling engagement and a remote sense of presence in multiple facets are being implemented and evaluated.

Based on the sense of being there in a virtual environment (spatial presence,) together with someone (co-presence), the sense of being in a remote, real environment (tele-presence) together (tele-co-presence) is being researched. Enabling technologies are being developed and tested together with community and industry partners in the lab and field. A range of engagement, presence, usability, and feasibility measures are being developed and applied (self-report, observational, physiological).

 

Knowledge is being gained about the relationships between cultural and environmental concepts and the sense of presence in virtual and real environments for novel virtual tourism experiences without the need to physically travel.

Theme - Augmenting and sharing touristic physical "being there" experiences

Tourists physically present in Aotearoa can share and augment experiences with remote people, actively engage with Māori culture, and nature in such a way that this will create regenerative tourist experiences. Stories and knowledge can be linked to locations to augment the tourist’s live experience.

 

Building on capturing technology and research how to be virtually together and make joint memorable experiences, we are iteratively developing a toolkit to use for applications that can be deployed in field studies with partners Adventure South NZ, DOC, and Ngāti Hau ki Akerama.


We are designing a minimally disruptive toolkit to field test it against the impact on live and remote experiences. Different novel measures for user experience, usability, engagement, awareness and presence are being developed and applied (including self-report, observational, and physiological).

Demos

We will be at the TIA summit: https://www.tia.org.nz/events/tourism-summit-aotearoa/summit-hub/"

Videos

Good stuff coming soon!

Publications

  • Lillian Maria Eagan, Jacob Young, Jesse Bering, Tobias Langlotz. Virtual Voyages: Evaluating the Role of Real-Time and Narrated Virtual Tours in Shaping User Experience and Memories. Proceedings of the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025.
  • Hannah Schieber, Jacob Young, Tobias Langlotz, Stefanie Zollmann, Daniel Roth. Semantics-Controlled Gaussian Splatting for Outdoor Scene Reconstruction and Rendering in Virtual Reality. 2025 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Saint Malo, France, 2025, pp. 318-328
    https://doi.org/10.1109/VR59515.2025.00056
  • Tanh Tran, Tobias Langlotz, Jacob Young, Thomas Schubert, Holger Regenbrecht. Classifying Presence Scores: Insights and Analysis from Two Decades of the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ). ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 2024, pp. 1-26.
    https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689046
  • Tanh Tran, Tobias Langlotz, Holger Regenbrecht. A Survey On Measuring Presence in Mixed Reality. Proceedings of the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2024, pp. 1-38.
    https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3613904.3642383
  • Lloyd Spencer Davis, Wiebke Finkler, Wei Hong Lo, Mary Rabbidge, Lei Zhu, Stefanie Zollmann. 360° Storytelling for Immersive Teaching Online and in the Classroom for Secondary and Tertiary Education. 2024 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW).

Opportunities

Tele-Presence for Remote Tourism Experiences

Overview

We are seeking two PhD candidates to research and develop immersive and semi-immersive tele-presence applications for remote virtual tourism, allowing for visitor experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand from anywhere in the world.

Applicants should have a strong technical background, preferably with experience in computer graphics, game engines, networking, human-computer interaction, and/or mixed reality. While the research will have a strong technical focus, the successful candidates will also be expected to engage with external stakeholders (our research partners, tourism operators, and local communities) throughout the design and evaluation process, and so a willingness to learn and engage with the unique culture of Aotearoa New Zealand is a must.

The successful candidates will also be expected to conduct and report on user studies to evaluate various aspects of the experience. Possible areas of research might include:

  • Real-time capture, reconstruction, and streaming of environments, people, and soundscapes
  • Asymmetric interactions between tour guides (on-site or virtual) and remote (virtual) tourists
  • Co-present many-to-many interactions between local (on-site) and remote (virtual) tourists
  • Cultural, environmental, and ethical considerations
  • Minimally viable product development demonstrable to end users and other stakeholders

Successful candidates will be supervised by Professor Holger Regenbrecht.

The positions are funded as part of the larger project investigating technology-supported tourism in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The candidates will work within the Human Computer Interaction Group at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago based in Dunedin, with the option to travel within the country as part of our regular stakeholder and community engagement.

The positions are open to all nationalities (i.e., the successful applicants do not have to be NZ or Australian citizens). An international candidate (non-NZ or non-Australian) will be required to apply for a NZ student visa to be allowed to study in NZ.

The positions are supported by funding of at least NZ$43,000 per year for 3.0 years. This includes a tax-free stipend of NZ$35,000 per year and a full university tuition fee waiver. The stipend is only available on the condition that the study is conducted in New Zealand.

Funding is also available for some expenses, including travel to external stakeholders and national / international conferences.

Role requirements

  • A master’s degree (or equivalent) in computer science or a related field – this must include a significant research component
  • Strong technical and research skills
  • The ability to live and study in New Zealand throughout the duration of the research (at least three years)
  • A willingness to learn and engage with the unique culture of Aotearoa New Zealand, including Te Ao Māori
  • Familiarity with Human Computer Interaction research methods is a plus
  • Where English is not an applicant's first or native language, evidence of English language proficiency that meets the requirements for postgraduate study at the University of Otago will be required.
University of Otago English language requirements

To apply

Please email the following to jackie.rees@otago.ac.nz:

  • Your Curriculum Vitae, including any relevant qualifications and publications
  • A copy of your academic transcript(s)
  • A cover letter, including a description of why you want to undertake a PhD, how your previous experiences have prepared you for the research project that you are applying for, what your passions are within or outside of academia, and an indication of your potential start date

If you are shortlisted, you will also be requested to provide the names and contact details of two academic referees willing to provide confidential comments on your suitability for the project.

Closing date for applications

Applications are due on the 30th of April 2025 at (AoE).

Contact Us

For any enquiries regarding the project, or if you are interested in doing a PhD with us, please contact us using the email address below.

holger.regenbrecht@otago.ac.nzEmail