During this year's National Day holiday, Tongjian Lake in Xihu District, Hangzhou, added a special scenic highlight: a fleet of driverless smart tour boats gliding through the lake and mountain scenery. Visitors do not need to paddle; the boats can achieve AI (artificial intelligence) autonomous navigation and automatically avoid obstacles on the water. On the tranquil lake surface, visitors immersively experience the beauty of the integration of landscape and technology.

"We just tried it out. The boat moved very smoothly on the lake and would avoid other boats in advance. The whole boat looks like a small spacecraft, very tech-savvy," said Wei Fangming, a tourist from Jiangxi.

"This National Day holiday, the driverless smart tour boats are very popular. Many residents and tourists came to the scenic area originally just to enjoy the flower fields and scenery, but unexpectedly discovered this 'new gadget' and all found it very novel," said Hu Yuhui, marketing director of Hangzhou Lingshan Scenic Area. On October 1, people experienced the driverless smart tour boat on Tongjian Lake. Photo by Zhang Yuhuan.

What appears to be a simple "unmanned boat ride" is backed by a comprehensive, high-precision intelligent navigation system. Hu Yuhui introduced that the tour boats are equipped with lidar, 4D millimeter-wave radar, visual sensors, and other devices. Through multimodal perception fusion technology, they build a real-time water environment map, achieving all-weather, all-time precise identification of obstacles, shorelines, and other environmental information, providing accurate data support for intelligent navigation.

In addition, the driverless smart tour boat project also implements AI voice guidance, intelligent scheduling, and remote monitoring. "Next, the scenic area will continue to develop water-based meeting rooms and water-based book bars, upgrading the smart tour boats into smart mobile spaces that can be experienced, consumed, and operated," Hu Yuhui said.

Not only Tongjian Lake, but during this National Day holiday, technology experiences are being embedded in cultural tourism scenes across many places in Zhejiang. At the Hangzhou West Lake Scenic Area, the upgraded "Digital Smart Brain" and AI tour guide "Hang Xiaoyi" continue to be on duty, using passenger flow prediction models to issue early warnings of peak crowds and dynamically plan off-peak touring routes for visitors; at Longyou Grottoes in Quzhou, humanoid robots perform interactive shows in the thousand-year-old underground caves, adding a futuristic feel to the ancient grottoes; at the Xikou Scenic Area in Ningbo, the AI accompanying tour guide "Feng Xiaotao" is launched, and visitors can simply call by voice to obtain explanations of historic sites and recommendations for photo spots, making the cultural heritage of the ancient town perceptible and knowable.

From single sightseeing to interactive, immersive smart experiences, Zhejiang relies on its digital economy advantages to continuously push digital technology out of the laboratory and into diverse cultural tourism scenarios. With landscape resources and historical heritage as the foundation, many places are exploring how to use cutting-edge technology to expand the boundaries of touring, allowing visitors to enjoy an immersive "technology + landscape" journey.