Stephanie Hawn is a 2014 SCCA Design graduate. She currently works as a VR interaction designer at HBO.
Stephanie and her team of 6 recently won the Microsoft/Boeing Passenger experience challenge at the Seattle VR Hackathon.
Her team was tasked with addressing several problems:
• Current inflight experiences are two dimensional and provide little to no detail about the passing geography or flight updates.
• A view of landmarks and geographical regions are not currently available from any seat on the plane. A passenger cannot see outside of the window easily when sitting in a seat that is located in the middle of the plane. Even when sitting by the window, the view is limited.
• The passenger has a passive experience from points A to B, reliant on the Captain’s updates for temperature, visibility and potential upcoming turbulence.
Their solution was to develop HoloFlight which displays a 360 degree view of the earth from any seat on the plane and utilizes a “glass bottom” concept to provide an aerial view of various points of interest. The experience is completely immersive from both a first person and third person point of view. HoloFlight engages the passenger in the flight experience, supported with visuals regarding geography, points of interest, future travel suggestions, flight updates, etc.
The experience was built for the Microsoft HoloLens using Unity assets and other free online resources.
Check out the Github Repo