This is lame. Was expecting an actual "inflight experience", but got a VR tour app of the cabin along with the same 'ol silly avatars.
Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
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Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#52The seeming lack of vision of everyone who is both connected to XR and has the money to actually make something is kind of demoralizing.
Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#53Lufthansa will do anything for its business class except make it any good.
What’s wrong with Lufthansa? It’s the only international business class I’ve ever flown. Had good experiences compared most domestic airlines in the US.
I flew with them a few times as well as KLM, Emirates, and Singapore. Lufthansa's customer service, on-board experience (i.e. food & entertainment), is not on par with the others. When a flight got canceled last minute, we were left hanging with a number to call and a long waiting line, and we are still waiting for our reimbursement. On the need to reschedule due to a positive coronavirus test, it took 16 minutes with KLM to reschedule and almost 3 hours with Lufthansa and a bunch of (online) paperwork.
On top of that, some strange management decisions like completely stopping pilot training and laying off the ones that started during Covid while getting financial assistance from the state and 2 years later struggling with a pilot shortage.
Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#54Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#55If I could look down mid-flight and see what was happening below…ancient battles, modern news events…that would be a truly educational inflight experience.
That is an awesome idea. I really hope someone runs with it.
This is a great example of a good idea that absolutely doesn’t depend on the technology at hand. In fact it might make it worse: in the middle of most flights you’re above the clouds. Any battle details would be infinitesimally small. And looking at the floor for extended periods of time would be very uncomfortable.
Why not take the same idea and just… show it on a screen?
Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#56Lufthansa will do anything for its business class except make it any good.
What’s wrong with Lufthansa? It’s the only international business class I’ve ever flown. Had good experiences compared most domestic airlines in the US.
The international business class is simply inferior to most of its competitors. Other airlines offer larger seats (4 seats per row vs. 6 seats per row). Their onboard entertainment systems use more modern hardware, provide a better selection of content, and sometimes even integrate better with personal devices. The culinary options are less refined. Additionally, Lufthansa still charges $27 for in-flight Wi-Fi. Their lounges are also subpar — smaller, more crowded, and with fewer culinary options. This is based on my personal experience flying with Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss (all part of the same group), British Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Turkish Airlines. However, other business travelers echo these sentiments. It's noticeable that they enjoy a lack of competition in their home country of Germany, since some healthy competition would force them to actually improve their business class offering.
Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#57I'm mostly surprised just how underwhelming this looks. Meta has buckets of money, and hires the absolute best engineers available, and what they can come up with is...this? It just looks so bad - ugly lighting, bad textures etc etc. If this is a showcase of the best that Quest can be, I'm surprised.
The Quest is pretty limited in hardware. The article mentions they use both Quest 2 and Quest 3; the Quest 2 is a $250 device that runs on a 5 year old mobile chip (about the same as the one in the Galaxy S20 Plus). The Quest 3 is much better (about on the level of a $500 phone), but they might just use the same games on both.
And in VR/AR low latency and high framerate are much more important than visual fidelity. Your brain just kind of accepts those low fidelity representations, but reacts very badly to latency spikes or frame drops.
Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#58I get the hate, but I find this semi-interesting. I flew business recently and the airline had a '3d' walkthrough of their cabin (i.e. 360deg photos at multiple points), a bit like property market listings where you have to press a bunch of arrows to move around. It may seem daft, and you may not be able to imagine someone using this in its current iteration, but I reckon as VR-wear becomes less clunky, stuff like th…
> but I reckon as VR-wear becomes less clunky, stuff like this will be really useful. The thing is, I can already get a really good overview of the interior of the plane I'm gonna fly on, based on the actual textures and natural lighting, by doing a quick search on youtube. It doesn't matter how less clunky the interface gets, when I can already get the same result with no added interface at all.
And as a frequent flyer with a preferred airline you probably know with a fair bit of granularity what seating options are like.
I'm all for potential novelty on a long plane flight and I'm sure I would fiddle with it for 30 minutes at least but it doesn't really draw me either.
Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#59I wonder if training customer service reps in VR will further hinder abilities to empathize with customers. I guess we’ll know if they start killing, looting, then teabagging clients.
Re: Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality
#60This just looks entirely pointless and the product of a marketing team with too many staff.
For Meta this is great because it exposes lots of people to their product. And since it's business class many of those people are either influential or at least open to buying a $250-$500 headset to show the same experience to their kids at home. For the customer it's interesting because flights are often somewhat boring, so having the option for a whimsical distraction is nice. When the novelty wears off after 30 mi…
You could say any of this about the Rayban Meta glasses they are advertising heavily on TikTok. It is a very optimistic take on things that's unlikely to work out.