Can 360° VR and customization foster personal connections between tourists and locals? An experiment in the sharing economy and hospitality frame

Tourism and hospitality have shown to be one of the pioneering sectors in the sharing economy, taking advantages of a collaborative and peer-to-peer market model. In this context, we present ShareCities, a system that allows tourists to exploit a 360° virtual representation of locals' room, customized to include peculiar details related to the host's life/interests/hobbies. Using ShareCities, locals can publish information about themselves and about what to see and do in their locale, while visitors can browse authentic and unmediated information provided by locals, and use the platform to initiate a conversation with them. To evaluate our approach and verify if 360° VR and customization could foster personal connections and affinity, and, eventually, empathy, we carried out an experiment engaging 19 users, obtaining interesting results.