(Photo courtesy: Courtesy Frontiers of Flight Museum, Dallas, Texas)
Work in progress…
For my At the Airport column on USA TODAY I’ve been researching moving walkways at airports.
Geeky topic, yes, but there’s technology, drama, technology death and whimsy involved in the development of these helpful airport amenities.
The column should post next week, but I wanted to share the photo above, which is from Dallas Love Field in 1958, when the first moving walkway in an airport was installed.
Best Buy’s Geek Squad will be on duty at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport from Monday December 14 through Sunday December 20 offering free technology advice, charging stations, product demos and complimentary device setup on purchases from in-terminal Best Buy Express Kiosks.
The Geek Squad “Pop-Up Tech Experience” will also include tablets and desktop workstations for going online and offer activities for kids.
The Geek Squad will also be distributing more than 20,000 giveaway items, including gift cards (of up to $100) for Geek Squad in-home services, Geek Squad service discounts, Best Buy gift cards, device sanitation wipes and other travel-themed gifts.
Curious about what iBeacons – those small Bluetooth transmitters that can ping you with information when your phone comes into range – can do for you at an airport?
At SFO Airport, Cathay Pacific and Lounge Buddy are using the technology to give guests using the airline’s Business and First Class lounge some bonus features – and a chance to win prizes.
The promotion is linked to the kick-off of Cathay Pacific’s three new weekly flights between SFO and Hong Kong.
Starting June 29 and running for 60 days, passengers with the LoungeBuddy App activated on their iPhone will instantly receive information about the day’s food and beverage menu and an overview of the lounge amenities when they enter the Cathay Pacific lounge at SFO.
They’ll also be gently urged to check in on social media and share a note on Twitter about the experience for a chance to win a daily prizes of a Cathay Pacific plush goat commemorating the Chinese Zodiac year of the goat.
Any lounge user who shares a comment on Twitter or Facebook will be entered to win the grand prize of 60,000 Asia Miles and one round-trip Premium Economy Class ticket to Hong Kong.
Cathay Pacific is well-known for its classy and creative airport lounges. The one at SFO (which opened in International Terminal A in 2011) is the carrier’s first and only branded lounge in the U.S. and features the airline’s much-talked-about Noodle Bar.
Who gets to use Cathay Pacific’s SFO lounge?
First and Business Class passengers departing on Cathay Pacific and oneworld carriers, and members of the Marco Polo Club with Silver Card status and above and oneworld Sapphire or above members.
Forget the seat-back screen and your bring-on-board tablet.
In an in-flight entertainment first, Australian carrier Qantas will soon be making Samsung’s virtual reality headsets, called Gear VR, available to premium passengers on some long-distance flights.
A three-month trial run begins in mid-March, when Qantas plans to make the headsets available to first-class passengers on some of the airline’s A380 flights between Australia and Los Angeles.
Visitors to Qantas first-class lounges in Sydney and Melbourne have headsets to test now.
Someday, Qantas says the VR technology “will transport customers to an immersive virtual world … and showcase the sights and delights of network destinations, new Qantas products and the latest in-flight blockbuster movies.”
But for now, Qantas is just giving passengers a virtual reality sampler of short features, or “vignettes,” filmed in Australia and produced by Palo Alto-based technology company Jaunt. The playlist that allows headset-wearers to watch a Qantas airplane take off and land and visit the top of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, a Qantas airport lounge and Kakadu, Australia’s largest national park.
“Travel and VR make a natural pair,” said Jaunt CEO Jens Christensen. “We’ve gone from no in-flight entertainment, to one drop-down screen, then screens in the seats, and now personal screens,” said Christensen.
“VR is the next step on the evolutionary scale,” he added. “Instead of a limited-size screen, a passenger is transported to a new location.”
That’s appealing if the technology is someday used to “virtually transport economy-class passengers in ultra-tight seating … to other more spacious ‘realities’ outside of the metal tube,” said Mary Kirby, founder of the Runway Girl Network. But widespread adoption by airlines “appears unlikely now” due in part to the high costs associated with the headsets and their handling, she added.
Another concern: making passengers sick. For some people find virtual reality experiences can sometimes trigger vertigo, nausea or worse.
“I think putting any device that simulates motion into something that is already moving will guarantee those air sickness bags won’t just be used for scribbling notes,” said Frank Catalano, a tech industry consultant and a columnist at GeekWire.
The stationary filming techniques used in the Qantas VR vignettes should help, said Jaunt’s Christensen, “When you’re in our environments, you’re stable. We found that eliminates the nausea.”
But what if the virtual reality experience is too good? Will travelers no longer need to actually go to the places they’ve “visited” during their flights?
“We think by transporting our customers to the immersive virtual worlds of destinations that [they] have never seen, the VR Gear will actually inspire our customers to travel more,” said Olivia Wirth, a Qantas executive for marketing and corporate affairs.
Catalano, a frequent traveler, agreed. “You simply can’t replicate the smells, the tastes, the serendipitous discoveries, the off-handed casual conversations with locals, the immersion into a new and different culture,” he said. “All virtual reality can do is stimulate the appetite for the real thing.”
(My story about virtual reality testing Qantas first appeared on CNBC in a slightly different format.)
Courtesy United Airlines
United Airlines is joining the ranks of carriers that can bypass seatback screens and deliver on-demand, in-flight entertainment directly to gadgets brought on board by passengers.
“We’ve noticed more and more customers have their own personal electronic devices when they fly, so it just makes sense to provide this service,” said United Airlines spokeswoman Karen May.
The service, provided by Panasonic, will allow passengers with Wi-Fi enabled devices to access over 150 movies and TV shows stored in on-board servers.
Apple users will access the content through United’s new iOS app; laptop users will just need to open a browser. An app for Android devices is still under construction.
United will begin testing the new service this week on a Boeing 777 flying between the mainland and Hawaii. “We’ll then gradually expand the personal device entertainment system to other 777s flying to Hawaii and then to other fleet types that currently don’t have on-demand seatback entertainment systems,” said May.
Programming will be different than that offered via the on-demand seatback system and will be changed quarterly at first and eventually refreshed monthly. During roll-out, the service will be offered to passengers for free, “but I can’t say it will always be that way,” said May.
United is not the first to begin offering on-demand programming to passengers’ personal devices. “Many airlines are rolling out this ‘from the Netflix server on the plane to your device via Wi-Fi’ option for passengers,” said John Walton, direct of date for Routehappy. Fliers get a wide range of content “often for no more than the price of downloading it from iTunes and, for airlines, it’s a lot cheaper and lighter than installing a seatback entertainment system,” he said.
For a fee, passengers on many American Airlines, Delta and US Airways flights can stream on-demand movies and TV shows via Gogo Vision. Other airlines streaming to passenger devices include Air Canada, El Al, Norwegian, Scoot and Virgin Australia. “Southwest offers streaming video plus streaming live TV, while Qantas offers streaming to the airline’s own iPads, which are rigged to the seat in front of you in a kind of sling,” said Walton.
It seems like a trend, but experts say Hollywood is making sure seatback in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems aren’t going away just yet.“Major airlines are still making significant investments in fixed IFE systems and backseat screens on wide-body aircraft because they want to offer the latest Hollywood blockbusters to passengers on long-haul flights,” said Raymond Kollau, founder of airlinetrends.com, an industry and consumer trends research agency.
“This so-called early-window content is restricted to fixed seat-back systems and select airline-owned tablets because of the perceived risk by Hollywood that their latest releases will get copied when streamed to passenger devices,” said Kollau.
But that barrier may not last long.
“Many airlines would like nothing better than to rip out embedded systems,” said Mary Kirby, founder of the Runway Girl Network, “and the moment Hollywood relents on early window to personal electronic devices, or connectivity can support streaming over the pipe, is the moment that embedded IFE will go the way of the dodo bird.”
(My story about changes in in-flight entertainment first appeared on NBC News Travel).