Australia

Food from space, spotted in Sydney, Australia

Greetings from Sydney, Australia where I’m touring the city and attending the Annual General Meeting of IATA  – the International Air Transport Assocation.

While in town, I visited the Powerhouse Museum, one of the sites of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences and, in the Space section, came across a few examples of old food from space.

 

This container, made by NASA, is from 1973 and was created so that astronauts on the Skylab space station could drink a lemonade in space.

According to the museum notes, this white plastic ‘concertina-shaped’ cylinder has a “brownish lemonade drink paste” inside which would be reconstituted by adding water. A velcro tab attached to the bottom of the container presumeably was used to attach the drink to a surface to keep it from floating in the cabin.

Also on display- Space food for cosmonauts from 1993:

From the museum notes:

“Inside the package are five individual food items including a tube of fermented cabbage soup (in paste/puree form), a tin of pork and potatoes, ten bite-size cubes of black bread sealed in a plastic wrap, a plastic sachet of peach and black grape juice powder and a small sachet of condiments. The juice sachet is folded over and comes fitted with a valved nozzle through which it would be rehydrated and drunk.”

Yum?

Sydney, Australia is full of clowns

Business class seat or not (and thank-you again, Qantas for the business class seat), if your journey from home to your destination take 20 hours or more you want some ‘wow’ on the ground.

And Sydney, Australia is delivering.

A hike along the sandstone cliffes from Bondi Beach to Bronte Beach, in the suburbs of the city, was “surftastic.”

And Luna Park – a 1930s-era amusement park on the northern shore of Sydney Harbor – was filled with classic rides, great arcade attractions and plenty of clowns.

 

More soon.

Virtual reality testing, courtesy Qantas

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.

Qantas virtual reality headsets to be tested on some A380 flights_courtesy Qantas

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.)

Spotted in Sydney

Greetings from Sydney, Australia.

I’ve been here for three – way too short – days and heading to Dallas on Monday with Qantas Airways, which starts flying the A380 between Sydney and Dallas on Monday, September 29th.

With the help of Destination NSW, I’ve been racing around the city trying to see the sights – and paying dearly to replace a broken camera – in preparation for an early morning tour of Sydney Airport.

Here are a few snaps of what I’ve spotted so far. More to come…

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Spotted at the Museum of Sydney: souvenirs of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

 

Sydney Koala

Was treated to a tour that included a face-to-face with a sleepy koala at the Taronga Zoo.