British Airways Flies With Google Earth
British Airways Flies With Google Earth – Forbes.com
It’s in the web reservation system, apparently. That’s pretty cool. Next, I want GE to replace that old in-flight map I see on most US flights, even if it’s just one computer driving all of the TV screens at once (on tour mode, for example).
Which reminds me of something old, that’s probably been tried already. I pitched an idea a long time ago (1992, I think) for an augmented reality system for airlines. The idea is to put cameras at various points around the plane, the nose, the wing tips, the belly, such that you get enough information to make a full spherical panorama, like in QTVR. The image stitching would be done by one computer, serving up images at some reasonable number of frames per second. Then each passenger could use their in-seat TV (or HMD) to pan around individually, giving the sense that they were flying (I mean, without the plane). With a good HMD and low-latency tracking, it would feel a lot like you were in the air with an invisible plane. How cool is that?
The closest I’ve seen is the nose cam channel on some airlines, which is pretty cool during takeoff and landing. Needs interactivity.
OTOH, DirectTV is much cheaper and a better brain-pacifier overall. Oh well.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment