Brochures still have their place, but trends have moved on from simply leafing through glossy pages and choosing a holiday based on what looks nice or affordable.
British adventure specialists Explore! were in Dublin to showcase technology that reads your mind and offers you a destination country based on the mood of your brainwaves. Would-be customers put on a little plastic device, sit in a small pod and are then shown a series of dramatic videos, ranging from desert scenes to biking to swimming with turtles or encountering animals on safari.
Explore! Managing Director Ashley Toft as the adventure specialists reveal their brainwave technology at House, Dublin
How your brain reacts – showing excitement, curiosity and so on – is then fed into a computer which tells you where you want to be. Guinea pig Jim Murty of the Irish Daily Mail got Scotland – not his first choice, given that he’s from Scotland. Botswana popped up quite a bit, while Travel Extra got Jordan.
Explore! Managing Director Ashley Toft showcased the technology with his team, at House in Dublin. The special software known as electroencephalography, or EEG, tracks your emotional reactions to visual stimuli, and has been trialled on would-be customers around shopping malls in England and Scotland. The company says the program interprets subsequent electrical activity from the scalp and measures voltage fluctuations “resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain… the technology can then interpret this neurological activity to decide if you find something pleasurable”.
“We got back into the Irish market starting with this year’s Holiday World,” said Toft, revealing that “photographic holidays to Chernobyl are popular, spending two days exploring the Exclusion Zone”. He said the company is focused on experiences around the globe.
The include ones where travellers are immersed in local cultures with local people, and one unique trip to India where travellers get to visit a monastery which holds the Guinness World Record for chanting – non-stop all the way back to 1964.
