VR engages people and combines physical, visual, audio, and personal experiences. move about and get the feel of how spacious and cool our new aircraft are,” explains Emmi Teräs, Finnair’s head of marketing communication. The discerning global traveller increasingly makes his or her choice according to the type of aircraft offered by an airline, and the VR “show” is recognition of this. “This is as close as you can get to actually visiting the aircraft, giving us a lot of opportunities to engage people and communicate through the strongest of senses - physical, visual, audio and personal experience,” she says. The travel industry has seen a range of VR solutions for marketing, promoting destinations, or simple “walk-throughs” of aircraft, for example. “More applications will come for promotional purposes,” says Teräs. “In addition to its marketing and sales benefits, VR has the potential to contribute towards instructions for onboard procedures, or at the airport and at destinations for tour guides.” VR GATHERING PACE An exploration of Slush 2016 revealed all sorts of other potential VR applications, as well as Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, which add digital “enhancements” to existing reality. Some industry gurus used the opportunity to make bold predictions about the technology’s future. According to David Helgason, one of the brains behind the Unity video game platform, innovations in VR will gather pace at an even faster rate than that of mobile phone technology in the last decade. It seems appropriate, then, that Nokia, the main driver of mobile technology in its earlier heyday, has turned part of its focus to developing the world’s first professional Virtual Reality camera. Also demonstrated at Slush 2016, Nokia Technologies’ OZO is a spherical device with accompanying software that captures 360-degree video and high-quality audio, simplifying the recording process and expanding access to VR production. Unity’s gaming technology may have set the scene for VR development, but games are only the tip of the application iceberg for both VR and AR. Training and maintenance for commercial customers will eventually make use of later incarnations of the technology as a matter of routine, thinks Zhongliang Hu, development manager of ABB in Finland. “Using AR we’re already building applications using the Microsoft HoloLens, to assist personnel in the systems that they are working on,” says Hu,
The organisers of Slush aim to make it the world’s biggest start-up event.
A visitor to Slush immerses himself in a Virtual Reality “show” recorded using Nokia’s OZO camera.
who was among the ABB team at Slush demonstrating the technology. The HoloLens, billed as “the first self-contained holographic computer,” allows the user of the headset to interact with digital content and holograms. “Today most of us still use a solution where you have to take a piece of paper, and follow step one, step two, and so on, and you might not even know if the instructions are up-to-date,” he says. “We can digitalise the process using Microsoft HoloLens technology, leaving your hands free to do the work.” If these scenarios conjure up a future world in which everyone wanders about dressed in headsets, immersed in their own separate, segregated virtual realities, Finnair’s Katri Harra-Salonen offers some comfort. “Customers will be able to find out about our services using VR,” she says. “But it’s never going to replace the experience of actual flying and people are still going to want to actually travel.” Real reality, then, has a future. l JANUARY 2017
Tim Bird is an English writer and photographer living in Finland whose latest book of photos, from Helsinki’s Suomenlinna fortress, is published in March. BLUE WINGS
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