Economic Development of the West Michigan Lakeshore Through Application of 3D Virtual Tourism

Tourism along the eastern lakeshore of Lake Michigan is vital to the economic health and well being of West Michigan. Recent measurements have shown that State tourism traffic has been slightly down over the past three years, further compounding an already longstanding deficit in travel trade that Michigan has with other competing areas of tourism outside the state. Increasing tourism traffic along the coast of West Michigan would have a direct and significant impact on the economic development of these lakeshore communities, and impact the state in a positive way also. The purpose of the project is to introduce, apply and evaluate available new and emerging Web3D Internet technologies to help bolster on and off-season tourism for lakeshore West Michigan communities though a process called 3D virtual tourism (3DVT). 3DVT allows the natural heritage, cultural, recreational and commercial features of a tourist community to be represented in a virtual 3D environment on the Internet, which can be explored by people on their computers whenever they choose to. 3DVT also incorporates appropriate tourism schema from tourism content curators and experts to help implement tourism management strategies. The economic return of this system will be derived from the increased tourism and e-commerce spawned by the virtual tourism feature, which is the hypothesis of the research.