WE HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE - THURSDAY 19TH JUNE - PARIS

 

Around fifty years ago, Michael Leunig published a cartoon which was a sad ironic reflection of the times that were to come.

It depicted a small boy and his father sitting on a couch, watching a delightful sunset on a lonely television set in the corner of the room, while behind them, outdoors, framed in the window was the very same view.

Not long after that we visited the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, climbed its belfry with our two tiny children in tow and were rightly stunned by the architecture and the decorative detail.  ln the early 1980’s there were queues, but there was not the same pressure that today sees hundreds of visitors per minute file through, unable to appreciate , or experience, or dare I say it “feel” the things that take time and perhaps solitude or contemplation to discover.

Since then we’ve passed it many times, walked around and beside and marvelled at the impossibility of it all, but we’ve never since felt the need to join the throng of tourists of all descriptions baking in the summer queues..

Today was different.   

Just a few hundred metres from the real thing and that crowd, there is an exhibition in air conditioned virtual reality, a guided tour of the building from its inception to today.  We stood beside masons cutting the original stonework, marvelled at the carpenters as we climbed the scaffold to see their work, and stood with the crowds watching in horror as the cathedral burned just a few years ago.

As a spectacle it was astonishing.  

Even in this early iteration Virtual Reality provides a believable experience. As we climbed through the building, inspecting the corners not accessible to the throngs waiting in the queues outside, watching the reconstruction at an intimate distance we could not help but contemplate some interesting questions about the future of tourism.

If we can experience this one city block from reality, why can’t we experience it on the other side of the world?   Why in the not too distant future when we succumb to the ravages of advancing years, will we need to travel at all?

How long will it be until in our nursing home beds, we will be able to revisit today, be virtually present in any part of the world at any time?

Soon enough, we hope!