1. Introduction

From the perspective of globalization, the development of cultural tourism has always been the driving force for the development and cultural inheritance of countries and cities. Cultural tourism is a movement that people go to cultural attractions outside their places of residence to obtain information and knowledge to meet their cultural needs. This form of tourism, which combines culture and tourism, has developed rapidly, accounting for more than 39% of the total number of tourists (UNWTO, 2018). In order to conform to the era of globalization and the development of digital technology and meet the emerging tourism demand brought by the integration of cultural tourism, the digitalization of cultural resources has been actively promoted and developed in many countries.

Since the end of the 20th century, the combination of computer, digital technology and information has realized the sophisticated technological evolution in cyberspace. This attempt to combine physical space with virtual space has been applied in various fields, among which digital technology has a growing influence in the tourism field (Vargo et al., 2021). Because digital technology can provide diverse and convenient methods to promote the efficiency of information management and value adding in tourism (Roque and Forte, 2017). Moreover, especially for intangible or hard-to-display cultural heritage resources, digital technology can be used to realize long-term preservation and display (Belhi et al., 2017). Many digital libraries and museums have transformed immovable, irreversible, abstract and exhibition-restricted cultural relics into contents that can be seen, heard and felt more diversified, flexible and lasting by means of ‘cultural relics technology’. The early research on the digitalization of cultural resources mainly focused on digital collection and recording (Erturk, 2020). At present, the tourism field focuses on the influence of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) on cultural reproduction and experience (Trunfio et al., 2022).

On the basis of digital technology, in order to meet the demand of ‘immersion+’ in the tourism market, immersive performance has become a new form of telling culture in many countries and regions. Goffman’s theater theory holds that when people interact with each other, they are actually performances and manifestations (Goffman, 2023). Performance is the practice of cultural embodies practice, which is a comprehensive knowledge system and a very powerful tool to express emotions (Das, 2015). Immersive performance redefines the traditional active and passive relationship between the audience and the performers, placing more emphasis on participation and immersive experience. And by creating aesthetic environment to enhance the space experience, change the way the audience perceives the geographical and cultural content, and actively participate in the story or culture of the performance (Binette, 2014).

Therefore, it is necessary to explore the digitalization of resources and immersive performances that meet the needs of the times and cultural tourism in cultural communication and understanding. Immersive performance will be effectively used in places of ancient culture, and cities with cultural allusions or geographical history as their cultural background will have more innovative opportunities and ways to complete multi-dimensional cultural display and cultural popularization, such as Luoyang, China. Recently, Luoyang has established a digital museum to promote AR and VR tourism. This paper, taking Xunji Luoshenfu as an example, discusses the role and influence of the digitalization of resources and immersive interpretation on cultural tourism from four aspects: multi- dimensional display of cultural connotation, immersive space perception, immersive performance and interactive experience.¹⁾ Xunji Luoshenfu is the first large-scale immersive field space built in China, which integrates digital museums and immersive performances. This study aims to explore novel expressions of local culture and diverse approaches to cultural re-presentation; to investigate the fluidity of culture, as well as the dynamic processes and interrelationships between tourists’ immersive experiences and cultural, and also geographical, engagement; and to examine within multi-dimensional displays, immersive spaces, immersive performances, and interactive experiences, there emerges a dynamic cycle of content-technology-emotion- cognition-content reconstruction.

To explore tourists’ motivations and experiential perceptions, this study conducted a questionnaire survey among visitors of Xunji Luoshenfu during November-December 2023, and 54 valid questionnaires were responses. To investigate the individual effects of digital multi-dimensional displays, immersive spatial perception, immersive performance, and interactive experience on tourist experience within the realm of cultural geography, this study developed a questionnaire and employed a five-point Likert scale (ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”) to conduct a quantitative analysis of the relevant variables. Based on the survey results, interview questions were subsequently designed for tourists, and five participants were randomly selected for semi-structured interviews. Meanwhile, to investigate the innovative approaches to cultural representation and the creation of immersive experiences at Xunji Luoshenfu, semi-structured in-depth interviews were carried out with its managers and performers, resulting in a total of 10 interviews.

2. Literature Review

1) Cultural tourism

Cultural tourism means that a tourist stays away from his residence, systematically looks at what he visits, and tries to construct what he sees with the help of a set of cultural values, so as to experience what he sees (Ponsignon and Derbaix, 2020). In a broad sense, tourism aimed at tourism activities with human resources as the main content includes historical sites, architecture, national art, folk customs and religion (Du Cros and McKercher, 2020). Cultural tourism can usually be regarded as an interactive form of social and cultural relations between people (Smith, 1992), enabling participants to rebuild their identities (such as nationalism, social identity, tribalism and transnationalism), and eventually contributing to the construction of a globalized world (Szeghi, 2014).

The realization of cultural tourism needs the unique geographical environment and special scenes in different places (tourist destinations), and the response to tourists’ expectations (seeking knowledge) is realized by taking the regional differences of tourism culture as the inducement. At the same time, this is also the reason why it has become a form of cultural tourism (Petroman, 2010). Thus cultural tourism research analyzes the relationship between cultural mobility, cultural identity and societies with different levels of development. In essence, cultural tourism expresses the way of thinking of tourists.

The value of cultural tourism lies in making the experiencers use the existing knowledge to gain new knowledge and understanding through thoughts, experiences and senses, and to discover and form a new knowledge system (Gurbuz et al., 2019). In relation to this, technology also affects our cognitive process and experience in the process of continuous progress. So, technology is a means to make the invisible things visible, which can realize the invisible cultural materialization, not only visual cultural relics and stories. How to interact and create ‘stories’ and communicate what we see has also formed a process of cultural experience and understanding (Rosenberger, 2009). Through cultural symbols, people can establish and find logical relations as external activities, which is convenient for us to organize as memories (Vygotsky and Cole, 1978).

Therefore, cultural tourism can be regarded as a collection of tourism activities in which the consumption content consists of attractions and leisure entertainment forms created by tourism market, enabling tourists to obtain rich cultural connotations and deeply participate in tourism experience. Creativity can be regarded as the core of cultural tourism, which can combine various factors, including resources, environment, market, social background and so on. It is very important to develop cultural tourism, which can not only enhance and improve economic benefits, but also vigorously promote national or regional culture, and has the value of cultural education.

2) Digitization of cultural tourism

From the end of the 20th century, with the continuous development of digital technology, the new tourism demand brought by the integration of cultural tourism and the changes in social life brought by technological innovation, the digitalization of cultural tourism resources has also begun to attract much attention.

Digitalization of cultural tourism refers to the process of transforming, integrating and reappearing cultural resources and tourism experience by using digital technology in the field of cultural tourism. It aims at sorting out and summarizing movable and immovable resources to protect assets, including digital protection, restoration, display and dissemination (Georgopoulos, 2018). By using digital technology, the information and cultural value of cultural resources can be truly recorded and preserved, and the sustainability and reproduction capacity can be ensured without being damaged (Ocón, 2021). The unique attributes of digital media affect the process of recording, describing, reconstructing, explaining, deducing and spreading cultural resources (Jin and Liu, 2022).

The research interest on the digitalization of cultural tourism resources has arisen with the advent of cyberspace, but previous research focused on digital collection and digital recording of cultural heritage (DeHass and Taitt, 2018). Digitalization provides a high-quality description of geometry, color, 3D scanning, photogrammetry and virtual repair (Bettio et al., 2013; Medina et al., 2020; Pietroni and Ferdani, 2021). These technical means are usually used to carry out digital acquisition and recording. There are also suggestions on using audio-visual digitalization of intangible cultural heritage to update archiving, dissemination and management (Hou et al., 2022). And virtual reality relying on digital technology can still realize digital access to cultural resources under the condition of limited physical access (Bekele et al., 2018).

In the digital media era dominated by immersive visual experience, the digitalization of cultural tourism resources can enable the audience to see the original appearance of cultural relics as cultural carriers, and enable people accustomed to the digital lifestyle to gain immersive spatial awareness and spatial perception, so as to achieve the effect of cultural understanding and high efficiency of communication, stimulate the enthusiasm of cultural learning and research, and enhance cultural pride.

3) Immersive performance

Performance has undergone a transformation from symbol to phenomenological understanding. Goffman (2002) and Schechner (2003) are pioneers in performance research, and performance is an inclusive term. From animal (including human) ceremonies to performances in daily life such as greetings, family scenes, and professional roles are all performances. Thus performance marks identity, bends time, reshapes and decorates the body, and tells.

Performance is derived from the word ‘perform’ (Jackson, 2004), the meaning of ‘perform’ in medieval English is wider, including the meaning of making, producing, causing and realizing, so performance originally has the meaning related to action. ‘To perform’ can also be understood as being, doing and showing doing (Schechner, 2017). The most inclusive meaning comes from Indian sage Bharata, who believes that performance is a comprehensive treasure house of knowledge and a very powerful tool to express emotions (Das, 2015).

The concept of immersion is often stated as an evolving 3D environment, namely, immersive virtual reality (IVR). The general consensus in the literature seems to be that immersion is a multi-dimensional structure. Researchers use various descriptive words to propose different dimensions of immersion such as sensory, perception, fiction, system immersion and psychological immersion (Lombard and Ditton, 1997; McMahan, 2013). For instance, McMahan (2013) describes the feeling of being surrounded by a virtual environment (VE), which is a passive immersion experience caused by the sensory simulation of technology. The other refers to the immersive active cognitive experience (Eaton and Lee, 2019), which is essentially a cognitive phenomenon. For example, imaginative immersion and narrative immersion usually need to participate in the narrative of content (Adams and Rollings, 2007). However, immersion technology is often used in isolation and not well used (Rauschnabel et al., 2019). Therefore, immersive performance is a breakthrough attempt, which takes the form of action, interaction and relationship. Thus, the information transmission and interaction between performers and audiences are immersive and relational (Schechner, 2017).

MacCannell (1973) introduced Goffman’s dramaturgical theory into the field of tourism research, which attracted scholars’ attention and gradually formed the theory of tourism performance. From the perspective of performance, the production and consumption of tourism space and culture are not binary opposites, but are jointly created by the host and tourists. In relation to this, space is not a static container composed of a fixed environment, but can be constantly created and changed by various performances (Coleman and Crang, 2002). Performance can be divided into the actors who create the tourism stage and tourists. For example, how the place is presented, how the key figures display the tourism products. Tourists gaze with multiple senses, which is also of a performance nature, and examine the relationship between the complex societies and the power of the flow. As Goffman (2023) said, during the performance, tourists observe how the body expresses, responds and transmits emotions. The same is true when people communicate with each other, in the process of interaction, the body will pose various postures, such as nodding, clapping, gesturing, avoiding sight, etc. That is to say, tourists not only transmit information through the body, but also the body itself is a socialized product, which is influenced by psychology and physiology (Crompton and Petrick, 2024; Gnoth, 1997). Therefore, performance is an embodied practice, whether it is an actor or a tourist. The essence of performance is the transmission of information, and the performance process itself is the representation of culture and the transmission of cultural consciousness.

Immersive performance is a new form of tourism performance with the development of digitalization in recent years. It emphasizes the fluidity of space and the intersection of digital space and physical space, breaking the ‘fourth wall’ that separates performers from audiences. Thus, immersive performance is the embodiment of the comprehensive performance system, which emphasizes the sense of presence and the experience of multi-sensory experience. So, the expression of emotions by performance skills makes performers and audiences form emotional resonance, and both of them complete the common experience in close participation, perception in interaction.

3. Characteristics and Digitalization of Luoyang Tourism Resources

1) Characteristics of Luoyang tourism resources

Luoyang is a prefecture-level city in People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Henan Province. Luoyang has served as the capital for 13 dynasties since the Xia Dynasty, and it has been a political center for over 1,300 years and is endowed with rich historical and cultural resources.²⁾ It is the city with the earliest capital, the longest duration and the most dynasties in China. At the same time, it is one of the four holy cities in the world, where Taoism originated and Buddhism was first spread. Geographically, Luoyang is located in the Luohe River Basin in the west of Henan Province, with flat terrain and abundant water resources. It has been a transportation hub and political center since ancient times. Until now, Luoyang still relies on its unique location advantages to radiate the Central Plains, which has great geographical significance in promoting regional economic development and cultural inheritance. It is the birthplace of Heluo culture and Yellow River civilization, the center of the Grand Canal and the starting point of the Silk Road during the Sui and Tang Dynasties. Various historical and cultural resources in Luoyang are of great value as tourism resources (Guo, 2008).³⁾

Luoyang has been in the middle of the economic development boom in China, experiencing rapid growth in social, economic, cultural and housing sectors, and tourism development has also been promoted as a part of economic development. Luoyang is one of the 24 historical and cultural cities designated by the State Council, China. The rich cultural resources based on this long history have stimulated the development of tourism resources in Luoyang. The most important historical and cultural relics in Luoyang are Longmen Grottoes, China Grand Canal and Silk Road.⁴⁾ Six of them are enrolled in the world cultural heritages of UNESCO.⁵⁾ From the perspective of existentialism, culture is a description of the way of existence of a person or a group of people (Hodkinson et al., 2023). Culture refers to people’s way of speaking or expressing, communication or behavior, consciousness or cognition during the existence of society, country and nation. In general, time and regionality determine the different styles of culture. Culture and tourism have always been inseparable, thus in Luoyang culture provides an important driving force for tourism. The relationship between the two has become more clear in Luoyang, and it has been identified as a specific form, namely, cultural tourism. The growth of international and domestic travel and the identification of cultural tourism as a ‘good’ form of tourism that would stimulate the economy and help conserve culture (Richards, 2001).

2) Digitalization of Luoyang tourism resources

With the development of digital technology and information age, digital means have achieved remarkable results in the protection and restoration of cultural resources. Since the 1970s, cultural heritage-related institutions began to try to record and preserve cultural heritage through digital technologies such as photography and video recording (Peck and Kwak, 2020). In the 1980s and 1990s, scanning was the main technical means (Spring, 2020). In the 1990s, many libraries, archives and museums began to record and preserve digital collections (Jaillant, 2022). With the advent of the 21st century, the emergence of commercial information providers such as Google and Microsoft has further promoted the digitalization of cultural heritage (Poulopoulos and Wallace, 2022).

The digitization process of Luoyang’s cultural resources can be traced back to 2005. The start of the ‘three- dimensional digitization project of Longmen Grottoes’ represents that Luoyang’s cultural resources have started to be digitized, and the three-dimensional scanning and virtual restoration of the grottoes have begun (Diao et al., 2019). More than 100,000 Buddha statues have been digitally archived, and the three-dimensional digitization technology has been used for ‘data aggregation’, so that the cultural relics of Longmen Grottoes distributed at home and abroad can cross time and space, be integrated and restored. In 2022, the ‘Digital Longmen’ immersive experience hall established through three-dimensional digitalization was put into operation, allowing the audience to enjoy the grottoes from multiple angles and in all directions. Through the network technology, the audience can also realize the remote visit of online digital portal. And the digitization process of Luoyang cultural resources is shown in Table 1.

Since 2020, Luoyang has been accelerating its digital transformation with history as its connotation, and many museums have increased the application of digital equipment and technology, such as the Sui and Tang Dynasties Grand Canal Culture Museum, Tianshang Longmen Immersion Experience Museum, Luoyang Peony Museum, Xiadu Erlitou Site Museum. 3D and VR technology increase interactivity and immersion, allowing visitors to interact with cultural relics or cultures in a new way. Luoyang Mudan Museum is the only peony-themed museum in China, with more than 70% digital exhibits, and an interactive area has been set up in the exhibition hall to display various cultural relics and other peony-related objects through digital technology. In the past two years, the immersive interpretation of Xunji Luoshenfu was built in Dahehui, Luoyang, which is the first immersive urban cultural tourism complex in Luoyang, it integrates four formats: digital performance, museum+business, Sui and Tang Dynasties cultural theme hotel and script entertainment industrial park. Xunji Luoshenfu takes Luoyang verve as the spiritual symbol, Heluo culture as the creative blueprint, and tells the story of Luoyang by digital and scientific means. It is characterized by immersive performances, and immersive museum experiences. Interactive performance is the way of experience, and multi- dimensional digital performance is used to create the first deductive form of China’s integration of exhibit, performances and shows.

4. Digitalized Display and Immersive Performance of Xunji Luoshenfu

1) Multi-dimensional display of Xunji Luoshenfu

The immersive performance of Xunji Luoshenfu is the first large-scale immersive field space built in China, which integrates digital museums and immersive performances. It was officially opened in May 2023. Based on Heluo culture, the story of Luoyang is told with the help of high-tech technologies such as AR, VR and naked-eye 3D, creating a unique cultural tourism experience in Luoyang (Figure 1, 2).

Figure 1.

Xunji Luoshenfu’s Digital Museum
(Photo by the author, 2024.07.05.).

Figure 2.

Xunji Luoshenfu’s immersive performance
(Photo by the author, 2024.07.05.).

Digital multi-dimensional display refers to digitizing, virtualizing and intellectualizing cultural resources through Internet display, virtual roaming, somatosensory interaction and holographic projection, so that users can receive information more conveniently and get more immersive sensory experience (Cai et al., 2023; Kong et al., 2019). Therefore, in order to meet the new demand of visual experience with cultural connotation as the core value and visual stimulation as the leading factor, and the tourism form with cultural understanding as the potential purpose, Xunji Luoshenfu adopted a multi-dimensional display characterized by interest, innovation, personalization, easy dissemination and diversified audience, which is a practical body that uses technology to influence experience and cultural cognition.

The questionnaire collects the results of tourists’ reasons for coming to Luoyang, experience motivation, multi- dimensional display experience, immersive space perception, immersive performance experience and interactive experience (Figure 3). The influence of multi-dimensional display on cultural tourism is as follows.

Figure 3.

The Influence of Multidimensional Display on Cultural Tourism (Source: by the author)

As can be seen from Figure 3, although a certain proportion of tourists disagree, most tourists agree that the multi-dimensional display of cultural information (such as holographic projection or 3D animation) is more visually stimulating, interesting and vivid than the traditional display. Especially for the culture or cultural relics that are not easy to display, the cultural communication mode of multi-dimensional display is more shared and universal. When people use the five senses to feel and process external information, compared with other senses, vision accounts for 83%, hearing accounts for 11%, and other senses of touch, smell and taste account for less than 6% (Rosenblum, 2011). Therefore, vision is the most important factor for the audience to experience activities and obtain information. It can be concluded that multi-dimensional display affects viewers’ cognition and learning of culture in a more interesting way on the basis of focusing on visual stimulation experience, and this influence is positive.

In order to improve the audience’s experience satisfaction and cultural understanding, the attention paid to the visual stimulation of Xunji Luoshenfu in multi-dimensional display, which can be learned from the interview with the staff of the marketing department of Xunji Luoshenfu:

Therefore, the pursuit of Xunji Luoshenfu uses the dominant visual factors in the five senses to give visual stimulation, and processes and reproduces the core value of cultural connotation in digital form, thus completing the potential purpose of cultural understanding in the form of innovation and entertainment. In the digital museum, the audience can learn about Luoyang’s history, culture and cultural relics through multimedia, an interactive experiences and virtual scenes. With the technology of augmented reality, the audience can learn or get richer or more stereoscopic visual experiences. Also, with holographic projection, surround sound, and interactive devices, the audience can fully integrate into the performance. In this point, media influences so deeply on the thoughts and behaviors of people and society, and media technology plays a decisive role in changing people’s cognitive model (Levinson, 2000; McLuhan, 1964). It seems that the multi- dimensional display of cultural information is innovative and interactive in the form of cultural communication, and local culture can be more widely and interestingly displayed on the basis of protecting cultural relics through digital technology, which is more conducive to the audience or tourists to reduce restrictions on cognitive culture.

2) Immersive space of Xunji Luoshenfu

Space is not only the place where all behaviors take place, but also a means to understand the causes of various behaviors and the cognitive processes involved. Space is defined only by what encloses it, the boundaries imposed on space, perception and use of spatial information reflect the experience, knowledge, goals and motivation of the organism (Dolins and Mitchell, 2010). Thus, spatial knowledge is cumulative, and through the attention and perception of spatial information, as well as through understanding the position and movement of the body in space, it produces the reaction behavior to environmental information. Space can provide the subject with space consciousness, situation, memories, knowledge, etc.

Spatial perception refers to the process that a person feels the world around him through various organ abilities (vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch, etc.). At the same time, it is also a process of perception, interpretation, storage, recall, editing, reconstruction and dissemination of spatial images (Hart and Moore, 1973). Visual and other types of perception incorporate spatial knowledge at multiple levels, Gibson (1985) and Haber (1986) have criticized viewing from a fixed location as atypical of ordinary viewing, where the observer is free to assume different vantage points and to obtain motion parallax information while moving about (Gibson, 1985; Haber, 1986).

The blessing of virtual reality technology and augmented reality makes it possible to realize an immersive environment and explore a person’s behavior and cognition. Immersive space perception is a kind of practice that combines physical space with cyberspace, which makes space be built into the unity of experience, story, perception and interactive experience. In this respect, Xunji Luoshenfu space can be regarded as a place for the audience to perceive, choose, edit, store and regenerate culture. So, the movement, time and behavior in this space are all reflected by spatial suggestion. Clearly, Xunji Luoshenfu shows the influence of immersive spatial perception to tourists (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

The Influence of Immersive Spatial Perception on Cultural Tourism (Source: by the author)

Which is shown in the Figure 4, about 77% of tourists agree that the space created by Xunji Luoshenfu is immersive, because the surrounding of it was so impressive and made audience to deeply engage in the scene. And the vast majority of tourists support the view that immersive space can provide new spatial awareness and cultural experience for the audience, and it has a positive role in awakening cultural memories and experiencing history and regional culture. Thus, Xunji Luoshenfu takes Heluo culture as the main line, then combines digital images, mechanical devices and live performances, and then allows the audience to deeply participate in the field space, so the space it creates is very immersive. Then it provides a theme through different perspectives, spaces and emotional dimension, showing Luoyang’s history and culture in an all-round way, and then let the glory of history and modernity blend and bloom in its field space. So, telling the story of Luoyang with science and technology is mainly to build the first large-scale immersive field space in Luoyang.

In this respect, we can get that the space created by Xunji Luoshenfu is based on culture, using digital technology to realize immersion, and has the characteristics of immersive space. At the same time, the author interviewed the personnel of the Propaganda Department about the relationship between immersive space and culture. The contents are as follows:

Whether emotionally or physically, tourists can participate in the interaction more actively and quickly in the immersive space, and then trace back to the cultural connotation contained in Xunji Luoshenfu. Moreover, this sense of space immersion can provide the audience with a cultural situation of space awareness, awaken the audience’s cultural memory, combine new historical knowledge with regional culture, and form the process of cultural dissemination, acceptance, storage and regeneration.

3) Immersive performance of Xunji Luoshenfu

The second layer of Xunji Luoshenfu is a space for immersive performance with viewing and interactive experience, which is composed of five scenes, namely, ‘Hetu Luoshu’, ‘Luoshenfu’, ‘Longmen World Heritage’, ‘Han Mo Liushang’ and ‘Resonance in Ancient and Modern Times’.

The 1990s, originated from Goffman’s theater theory, performance turns to debut. The performance turn theorists believe that tourism research needs a brand-new theoretical framework, which can cover seeing, doing, touching and viewing (Urry and Larsen, 2011). The performance turn of expression explains the following three aspects: themed and staged tourist attractions; the body is essentially acting, and the drama is written first according to the facts; the action of the body is the manifestation of tourism (Edensor, 2009).

The performance of Xunji Luoshenfu is the embodiment of these, with the constant changes of historical background and scenes, performers use different costumes and scenes as cultural carriers to represent cultural connotations. In this respect, the performer become the carrier of culture and the performer become the cultural medium. An important learning from the case study is the fact that a good digital art work needs to give consideration to both inheritance and extension, not only limited to words or a product, but also suitable for artistic performance. Because performance, as a cultural form, can bring this immersive experience to everyone through more vivid forms, and then promote traditional culture. For example, in the process of Xunji Luoshenfu’s performance, it is through the actors’ very infectious performance that the charm and value of traditional culture are conveyed to the audience.

Further, the actors have the ability to bend time and space through the blessing of costumes, scenes and languages, and what impact does the theme space have on cultural reproduction. Thus, through the language of costume scenes and so on, the whole performance of Xunji Luoshenfu is to let the audience really produce this crossing effect, and then restore historical and cultural story of Luoyang City, and these effects are achieved by building this theme space of Xunji Luoshenfu. So, the performance revolves around this historical theme as the noumenon, using live lighting art and costume culture, and also with music, lighting and immersive forms.

Therefore, the ‘theme-staged immersion space’ can be regarded as a symbol of cultural implication, and the actor as the carrier of cultural reproduction, makes the culture flow in a dynamic or liquid way. Performance is the cultural quality and necessary technology that constitutes tourism culture (Franklin and Crang, 2001). Performance endows an actor with identity, and at the same time bends time and space in telling cultural stories, which is also a tool to express emotions. So performance is that presents the words and emotions to the audience in a visible way, and cooperates with artistic landscaping to immerse the audience in the performance process.

Similarly, from the viewer’s point of view, immersive performance creates a ‘real environment’ and ‘real people’, and the viewer is also in the story, so viewer can experience the process and receive information more ‘be there’. The following are the interview results based on the immersive performance questions.

Therefore, performance is an expression technique or symbol of tourism culture, and the performer is a cultural carrier, and a liquid knowledge circulation system can be formed among the performer, the culture and the audience. Local culture spreads through innovative and diversified carriers with more immersive and liquid multi-sensory experiences (Dutta, 2020). Performance is to highly concise core cultural symbol of Luoyang, and it is highly integrated and presented in the artistic space by means of immersion and technology, which plays a positive role in enhancing the audience’s cognition and understanding of Luoyang culture.

4) Interactive experience of Xunji Luoshenfu

Human beings establish organizations and cultures from interaction, and at the same time, they form behavior embodiment that maintains development or change each other. The development of groups depends on interaction, usually based on the exchange of symbols with common meaning (language symbols or cultural symbols, etc.). Digital technology enables cultural symbols to present information in various forms, such as graphics, videos, sounds, animations, texts, etc., and enables people to actively and deeply participate in the communication process during the experience process in order to get responses and touches. Multimedia has the potential to create a comprehensive high-quality experience or learning environment.

The essence of interactive experience is communication, whether emotionally or in action, it is an affect process of mutual induction and feeling. This mode of communication is not one-way, but multi-way. As the experiencer and receiver of the content, the audience is also the creator of the reconstructed content. Interactivity is not only a function based on communication transaction, but also one of the basic success factors of experience and learning. Through the release and acceptance of information by both parties, the effect of mutual induction, exchange and promotion is formed (Qureshi et al., 2023).

Through the interaction of the five senses, the audience’s body will definitely become the object of historical construction and cultural constraints, and actively or passively accept the experience of cultural admiration. In view of the interactive problem, the interview with the performer who plays the hole digger in Longmen in the third act of Luoshenfu is as follows.

Compared with performers, as experiencers, the audience mostly have a positive response to the design of immersive performances and interactive experiences. Through this immersive performance, the audience learned a wealth of local history and culture, the peony and other local things which provides a good sense of interaction and participation.

Therefore, interactive experience is an affect process in which performers and viewers feel each other and attach importance to two-way communication, experience and learning. Performers understand and present culture, while the audience is not only the experience of cultural content, but also the disseminator of culture and the creator of cultural reconstruction.

5. Conclusions

In the global economic era of consumption and experience, cultural tourism, which bears the needs of cultural development in countries and urban areas, is also seeking a breakthrough to meet the needs of new experience in the digital era. The museum as a pioneer of cultural innovation, it is committed to the development of interactive multi- dimensional display and immersive experience, thus helping the audience to conduct cultural understanding and learning activities in an entertaining, ornamental and stimulating multi-dimensional way. And local culture also spreads through innovative and diversified carriers in a more immersive and liquid multi-sensory experience. ‘Liquid’ not only refers to the dynamic process of culture between the disseminator and the receiver, but also refers to the process in which the disseminator and the receiver release, deduce, receive, store and edit regenerate the culture (Dutta, 2020). Because the culture is displayed in an unusual and new dynamic way, and at the same time, it is integrated with new things that have nothing to do with it. In the constantly changing dialogue between technology, people, display dynamics and space, there is cultural regeneration and dissemination in the continuous change.

Projects such as the Xunji Luoshenfu, which center on culture and experience while leveraging digital technologies, exemplify the burgeoning trend of immersive cultural tourism. As new forms of cultural communication, digital display and immersive performances have certain advantages in multi-dimensional display of cultural content, immersive space perception, immersive performance and interactive experience. Especially for cultures and cultural relics that are not easy to display, through the digitization of resources and the immersive performance of expressing content and emotion, it is not much limited by time and regional solidification, but relies much on digital means for cultural representation. Immersive cultural tourism provides alternative solutions to overcome the problems of damage and repair caused by exhibition, and have the sustainability of cultural exhibition and dissemination. Immersive space creates cultural context and represents local characteristics by providing multi-dimensional sensory immersion. Immersive performance provides visitors with a sense of immersion through unique narrative means and spatial transformation, so that visitors can perceive and understand culture in a ‘be there’ way. Xunji Luoshenfu’s digital display and immersive performance have constructed multiple experiences and sharing paths between ‘cultural information- tourists’. Through innovative immersion and entertainment, it provides the audience with aesthetic and novel experiences, and perceives culture in an ‘immersive’ way, which improves the efficiency, diversity and popularity of cultural education. Giving the audience aesthetic and novel experience in an innovative immersive and entertaining way, it recognizes culture in a ‘be there’ way and enhances the efficiency, diversity and popularization of cultural education. In the digital age, museums or immersive performances are all adapting to the cultural tourism market demand of innovative experience. Immersive space is highly integrated with cultural content. Through emotional and information exchange with mobile and unique audience, personalized knowledge output, information feedback and multiple sharing methods are formed, so as to realize the concept network system ecology between display content and audience, and thus complete the flow cycle of ‘content-technology-emotion- cognition-content’ reconstruction.

Although immersive cultural tourism has certain advantages, there are still corresponding problems. On the premise of cultural content presentation, technology application, cultural education and sustainable development, cultural tourism should use space and design to realize all-round and sustainable immersive experience and interaction, so as to build a perfect immersive experience ecology and minimize the situation that form is greater than content. For example, in the process of viewing experience, because the sound of music is relatively loud, the narrative background sound about the interpretation of cultural content is drowned. And in the process of experience, there are cases where the line of sight is blocked. During or after the viewing experience, an interactive communication space for audience feedback can be established to expand the cultural space and knowledge space and realize knowledge reconstruction.

The current research provides and verifies that digital and immersive performances, as innovative forms of cultural tourism, have a positive impact on the cultural understanding and dissemination of national and local cultures. And the current research has academic and practical significance for the utilization of innovative ways of tourism development in various cultural backgrounds, especially for tourist destinations with multiple cultural directions. But the current research, like all studies, has some limitations. This research is based on a limited number of questionnaires and interviews collected in Luoyang, China, so the research results may be more suitable for the cases which utilize digital cultural tourism of historical resources. However, the value of this study can not be overlooked, and it is expected that various forms of digital cultural tourism will develop in the future, and immersive performances will play an important role in this process. This means that the complexity and diversification of tourism brought by digital technology indicates the changes of tourism in the future.

Above all, this study emphasizes that history and culture, which have been forgotten or difficult to understand, can be reborn as a familiar local culture by digital technology, which can lead to the development of cultural tourism.