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When Virgin America first launched in 2007, its entertainment system was notable enough that I called the plane “a multimillion dollar iPod — that flies.”
Eight years later, nobody has iPods any more, and that entertainment system is looking a little dated. So Virgin is upgrading from its old, Linux-based Red system to a new system, still called Red, that’s based on Android and sports better content and more interactive features.
The most notable difference is the touchscreen. With the old screens, as with most in-flight seat-back screens, you had to tap pretty hard to select items or press buttons. The new screens are capacitive touch screens that support pinch and swipe gestures, just like your phone, which should reduce the sensation of that person behind you tapping on the back of your seat.
“Now when you go onto an aircraft it’ll be more consistent with what people are used to on Earth,” said Luanne Calvert, Virgin America’s chief marketing officer, in an interview. (She also sits on VentureBeat’s CMO Advisory Board.)
The company will add more storage capacity, tripling the quantity of media it offers flyers for on-demand listening and viewing. Among that content: seasons 1-5 of Walking Dead, both seasons of Orange is the New Black, and both seasons of House of Cards.
“We’re going to encourage and allow bing-watching,” said Calvert.
The company’s also adding more games, including Atari’s Pac-man and Asteroids games.
It’s enhancing the maps feature, so if you want to zone out and watch the Earth scroll by underneath the plane, you can do that — and you can also pinch to zoom or swipe to pan on the maps now.
And Virgin is adding a surround-sound feature for selected video content, including the first two episodes of Game of Thrones season 5, and the movies Insurgent and Run All Night.
The surround sound feature is provided by Dysonics, which has been developing a surround-sound emulation technology for the past 15 years. It works with any headphones, from the cheap earbuds that Virgin sells its passengers for a few bucks up to the expensive Bose noise-canceling headphones that your CEO prefers.
I haven’t been on one of these enhanced Virgin flights, but I’ve tested Dysonics on the ground, and it does indeed provide a surprisingly roomy, 3D-like sounds with ordinary headphones. (See our previous coverage of Dysonics’ Rappr app.)
Dysonics will take the 5.1 surround sound audio from the studios and encode it to work with headphones on Virgin flights. But Dysonics has its eye on more than just in-flight movies.
“Our interest is in all audio that’s played back over headphones,” Dysonics’ chief technical officer and co-founder Bob Dalton told VentureBeat. That includes audio for augmented reality and virtual reality applications.
While it might be a long time before airlines actually upgrade their planes to support it, VR could eventually come to the in-flight experience.
“I could see people bringing their own VR headsets onto a plane in the near future,” Dalton said. “So it would be the ultimate take-you-out of the plane, where you’re sitting somewhere else entirely.”
For now, you’ll have to settle for surround sound in GoT.
The new beta system will appear on three Virgin planes starting tomorrow, and will be in 18 aircraft by the end of the year. The company plans to roll it out fleet-wide (on all of its 53 planes) by the end of 2016.
But for now, Calvert emphasized that this is a beta — and the company wants to hear your feedback.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know which flights will have the enhanced system.
“You’re just going to have get lucky,” Calvert said.
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Originally published on VentureBeat » Dylan Tweney: http://ift.tt/1C19oV0
