Considered to be an emerging topic in tourism research, traveling to familiar places benefits both the travelers and destinations. However, the current development of familiar tourism is severely affected by the epidemic. Recognizing the potential of virtual reality (VR), this research aims to explore VR’s relevance in the application of visiting familiar places and the empirical features of VR beyond on-site familiar tourism. We first reviewed the literature and developed an experience framework. Secondly, we conducted an exploratory activity in which participants (N = 16) used Google Earth VR to travel to their familiar places with two conditions (free exploration and task-oriented travel). In the activity, we employed think-aloud protocols, a scale, and semi-structured interviews. With our framework, we categorized findings into five dimensions and indicated the similarities and differences between familiar tourism in VR and that in actual places. Particularly, three empirical features (the sense of distance, multi-view space, and montage time) were recognized and formed VR’s opportunity to outperform on-site travel. We conclude by discussing the impacts of VR on familiar tourism and providing implications, including designing the timeline, sounds, tasks, and virtual guides. These suggestions inspire designers to acknowledge VR limitations and identify directions for future tourism applications. As a beginning of empirical investigation on VR familiar tourism, this study opens up a new field of discussion around VR tourism experience. We invite the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community to collectively probe into the VR experience and design of visiting familiar places. Efforts in this area will stretch beyond the current understandings of various forms of tourism and contribute to crafting rich travel experience by immersive technologies.

The use of design fiction to speculate an imaginative and critical future has increasingly been recognized in the design research community. Instead of focusing on speculation with a critical position, this paper reports an experiential approach to entangling everyday experiences in the process of speculating. As science fiction has successfully provided fictional-world-building as entanglement material for speculation, we held a workshop to conduct an entanglement experiment of personal photographs with cyberpunk literature, Neuromancer. We built a card deck consisting of 206 quotes from the novel and invited 15 participants to shuffle, draw, and re-compose sentences that best matched their personal photographs. Purposefully selected everyday anchors and sci-fi features in the quotes allowed us to investigate the moment when an everyday photograph encountered a fictional world. We describe the phenomena of imagination and entanglement, explain experiential entanglement, propose a conceptual model for entangled status, and present interpretations and implications in HCI.