Analysing recent augmented and virtual reality developments in tourism

Purpose: Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are two technological breakthroughs that stimulate reality perception. Both have been applied in tourism contexts to improve tourists’ experience. This paper aims to frame both AR and VR developments during the past 15 years from a scientific perspective. Design/methodology/approach: This study adopts a text mining and topic modelling approach to analyse a total of 1,049 articles for VR and 406 for AR. The papers were selected from Scopus, with the title, abstract and keywords being extracted for the analysis. Formulated research hypotheses based on relevant publications are then evaluated to assess the current state of the broader scope of the large sets of literature. Findings: Most of research using AR is based on mobile technology. Yet, wearable devices still show few publications, a gap that is expected to close in the near future. There is a lack of research adopting Big Data/machine learning approaches based on secondary data. Originality/value: As both AR and VR technologies are becoming more mature, more applications to tourism emerge. Scholars need to keep pace and fill in the research gaps on both domains to move research forward.