TECH-FRIENDLY SKIES

cargo and security product director for the association.

“You are living the training because you are active in the training,” Leger said.

“It’s like a game where you have a score at the end, so it goes to the emotional part of your brain.”

Considering that airline pilots do recurrent training in a simulator on a regular basis, bringing a simulated setting to other areas of the industry is not a new concept. It is only recently, however, that the improved quality and lower cost of virtual reality have made its widespread use practical.

With all the showy advantages of virtual reality, some airlines are trying to turn the “wow” into revenue. At a pop-up cafe in London earlier this month, Air Canada invited visitors to watch a Boeing 787 Dreamliner flight in virtual reality.

The German airline Lufthansa prepared a 360° video of the interior of its long-haul aircraft, and its employees presented viewing goggles to ticketed passengers waiting at boarding gates in Newark, New Jersey, and Frankfurt, Germany, last year.

After watching the show, Lufthansa, asked if they wanted to purchase an upgrade to a premium economy seat.

“How can you communicate a travel product? This is the problem in the industry,” said Torsten Wingenter, Lufthansa’s senior director of digital innovations. Virtual reality gave the company the “first chance to show the product in an emotional way”.

After the test, the emotion at the airline can be described as happy. A number of economy passengers paid US$299 (RM1,255) more to fly in premium economy after viewing the cabin in virtual reality. Wingenter would not say how many, but that it was “a significant number”.

Next month, Lufthansa passengers flying out of Los Angeles will be able to use biometric boarding — boarding gates that let passengers onto the airplane with no paper ticket or electronic boarding pass, just a face that matches their passport photo.

Passengers stand in front of a camera that takes their picture, and then compares it to the traveller’s image in the passport data base.

In a workshop in Geneva, the Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques (SITA) has several robots that travel to industry conferences around the world to start conversations about how autonomous vehicles might be used in aviation.

One robot, named Kate, is a self-directed check-in kiosk that moves to areas of congestion as needed. The other robot, Leo, takes bags from passengers and deposits them where they need to be to get routed to the proper destination.

“The robots are also demonstrators to get people talking about what is the future of autonomous vehicles in the airport,” said SITA’s technology chief, Jim Peters.

But, for all that technology has to offer, one of the most important tests is how well the next new gadget plays with people.

“Some things can be prototyped and some things can’t,” he said.

“Some things you have to have a physical interaction with to figure out what works.”