A smart lens on the past

Wu Fei, CEO of the Beijing-based AR company LLVision, showed up at the ticket booth with a pair of translation glasses earlier this year. A seller put them on and instantly saw translated questions and answers appear in his field of vision. He answered inquiries in real time. Later, tourists borrowed the glasses themselves, and used an AI-powered Q&A system to learn about the Great Wall's history as they climbed its ancient steps.

"The problem wasn't that the technology didn't exist," Wu said at the Beijing Fragrant Hills Tourism Summit, hosted by the World Tourism Cities Federation in early June.

"It was that nobody had put it in the right place at the right time."

At the meeting, a consensus emerged from a diverse group of panelists that the future of cultural tourism belongs to invisible technology that quietly serves the story, the heritage and the human connection. The best technology, they argued, is the kind travelers hardly notice.