Aeronautics VR
The Japanese airline, All Nippon Airways (ANA) recently announced that they are refreshing their 777-300ER cabins and premiered their upgraded business class model at a new products launch event on 24th July in Tokyo using virtual reality.
We worked with Acumen, a leading transport design consultancy and designers of the cabin experience and seating, to create a virtual reality tour of ‘The Room’, ANA’s new business class seat.
It is currently being rolled out at global launch events for press and industry in Tokyo and London, where attendees can virtually enter what will be one of the largest business class seating environments in the world and experience the unique features and comfort of the cabin first hand.
Virtual Tour
Users wearing the headset find themselves in ANA’s futuristic holodeck in front of a 777 aircraft. They are then transported into the business class cabin where they are able to experience the new seat’s features.
Unlike a video this is a full interactive experience, with users being able to look around the virtual cabin and interact with the environment using their hands. The experience is focused around the themes of work, meals and relaxation, enabling the headset-wearers to open and close cabin doors, order food, change lighting conditions and watch an inflight movie.
Realtime Visualisation
To create this, we took CAD data from Acumen’s design teams and adapted this to run on their real-time VR sales platform which sits on top of Unity, a games development tool. A process involving the optimisation of massive data sets to run at 90 frames a second on an off-the-shelf gaming laptop and Oculus Rift S VR headset.
For ANA, using VR allowed them to communicate the cabin’s world class comfort and passenger-friendly features to their audience without actually having to take them onto a B777 aircraft, making it very convenient and more cost effective. The immersive technology brings the user experience to life and makes it feels like you are really there, providing deeper engagement and retention of information than traditional media.
