XR Travel Case Study in Focus: Qualcomm, Skylights and Alaska Airlines – XR Today

Usually, when requested to think about what sort of use circumstances could be out there for journey firms within the XR world, folks think about a try-before-you-buy state of affairs. Digital Actuality headsets and AR apps supply a wonderful approach for folks to expertise an setting earlier than buying a journey ticket.

Nevertheless, the potential for XR within the journey business goes a lot additional than most individuals realise. Through the pandemic as an example, one of many greatest advantages of XR for journey manufacturers was its means to facilitate transportation to totally different places, with out asking a buyer to depart their house.

The identical expertise which powered armchair journey and VR adventures through the pandemic will also be used to supply travellers with a extra immersive, partaking, and memorable expertise once they’re on-route to their locations. Qualcomm, Skylights, and Alaska Airways are making the most of this reality to ship premium in-flight leisure to a brand new era of travellers.

Altering the Journey Expertise

For a lot of customers and companies alike, one of many greatest advantages of XR is it’s teleportation capabilities. With nothing however a headset and the suitable software program, you possibly can trick your thoughts into believing you’re virtually anyplace on the earth (or exterior of it).

These distinctive immersive experiences require entry to the suitable processing applied sciences and instruments, which is the place innovators like Qualcomm are available. Dedicated to serving to firms change the way in which they work together with their clients; Qualcomm Applied sciences has helped to energy a large number of helpful XR experiences through the years.

Not too long ago, the Qualcomm crew joined forces with a set of inflight XR specialists, Skylights, to create a singular content material expertise for travellers with Alaska Airways. The answer goals to supply a extra memorable in-flight expertise for these within the premier class seats on an Alaska airplane, by permitting them to totally submerge themselves in a cinematic viewing expertise.

As clients develop into rising involved in regards to the idea of journey, providing these distinctive experiences as a part of the journey may very well be an thrilling approach for journey manufacturers to seize the eye of latest customers, and make purchases really feel extra worthwhile.

A New Stage of In-Flight Leisure

In accordance with the Head of Gross sales at Skylight, Laurence Fornari, the mission of the corporate is to disrupt and rebuild the in-flight expertise. By investing in distinctive XR journey experiences for airways, the corporate is hoping to deliver extra immersive cinematic leisure to folks whereas they’re truly sitting in an plane.

This initiative started with equipping the premium cabin passengers on sure Alaska Airways flights with premium Allosky XR headsets. These are light-weight and cozy headsets, geared up with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 cell platform. Notably, the selection of Qualcomm’s platform was important for this challenge because it’s engineered particularly to supply the facility, velocity and efficiency required for one thing as complicated as in-flight XR leisure.

What’s extra, the Qualcomm platform can ship phenomenal high-quality photos and experiences, with out compromising on mobility, integration choices or safety. The wire-free headset lacks the cables and bulk related to most VR headset experiences, making them ideally suited for the smaller house offered by airline seats. The headsets additionally supply a formidable 1080p per eye decision, for a totally HD expertise that appears and feels as actual as potential.

To minimise the quantity of processing energy required to stream content material to the headsets, the Allosky XR gadgets are already loaded with a collection of 2D, 3D, and forward-facing 360 diploma content material choices. This features a catalogue of blockbuster motion pictures, for the usual in-flight viewing expertise. There are additionally 360-degree documentaries, world-class collection to flick through, and an XR for journey expertise.

The XR for journey expertise permits premium passengers to participate in immersive adventures, like transporting them to a world-class ballet recital, or a Cirque du Soleil efficiency.

Making Flights Extra Memorable

The answer constructed by Qualcomm and Skylight for Alaska Airways offers a brand new avenue for flight leisure which can permit folks to transcend the fundamentals of watching a small display screen on the again of their seat or holding a telephone or pill of their palms. As a substitute, you possibly can expertise your personal personal film theatre expertise for a really premium flight.

These in-flight XR experiences goal to assist folks escape the exhaustion of a long-haul flight, and will even help with lowering fears about flying. Nevertheless, the Qualcomm-Skylights expertise goals to vary journey experiences elsewhere too, by delivering instruments to airport lounges and aboard varied cruise ships.

In accordance with Qualcomm, it’s not simply the passengers who see the advantages of the XR experiences, however airways too. In-flight leisure hasn’t had many modifications over the previous couple of years, however XR programming may change all that. This implies airways that supply distinctive XR experiences will be capable to improve the client expertise and differentiate themselves from the competitors.

Alaska Airways believes that this expertise may even be a helpful solution to enhance model loyalty. Although the corporate has had a long-standing popularity for innovation and distinctive experiences, they really feel this new answer will take issues to the subsequent stage. The Product Supervisor for In-Flight leisure at Alaska Airways stated they had been eager to transcend what most airways are already doing. He additionally famous that the Allosky VR headset is without doubt one of the most fashionable he’s seen thus far.

Wanting Forward

Along with the latest trial flights created with Alaska Airways, Skylights has additionally begun to deploy its leisure options with different airways around the globe, together with SriLanken Airways, Air France, and XL Airways.

Qualcomm believes the launch of the Allosky XR headset expertise is a serious win for all of the members of the collaboration, in addition to XR gamers generally. In accordance with Qualcomm, introducing extra customers to XR, and exhibiting them what headsets can actually do will result in a future the place XR is extra extensively adopted in every single place.