Delta Air Lines has launched a custom initiative that promises to improve airport passenger flow. The Delta Parallel Reality Experience displays your flight information to you – and only you – on a large screen inside the terminal.
What is the Delta Parallel Reality Experience?
This innovation debuted as an installation available exclusively to Delta passengers traversing McNamara Terminal’s Concourse A at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Michigan, United States.
After passing through security, passengers scan their physical or digital boarding pass at a kiosk. From there, they stand in one of the viewing areas in front of the Parallel Reality Experience display.
As long as they stay within the viewing area, the screen will display a personalized greeting, flight details and directions to their departure gate, for their eyes only. They can even move around within the area. Passengers next to them will see their own information, and unregistered ones will just see generic images, like a privacy filter.
Imagine a hologram that changes shape or position when you move it, except this one projects your name and boarding time. You get the idea.
How Does the Delta Parallel Reality Experience Work?
This prototype combines two technologies. First, a display with proprietary multi-view pixel technology that can direct different-colored light to multiple observation points. Second, special sensors that implement anonymous non-biometric object detection.
Unlike similar virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) applications, the Delta Parallel Reality Experience works in real time without the need for intermediary cameras and screens to display information.
Delta spokespersons assure that this technology does not violate customer privacy. No passenger is forced to participate in this test and sensors perceive participants as objects without recognizable features.
The same applies to those who opted for the Parallel Reality Experience with their biometric data, since they previously supplied with consent and the sensors theoretically do not take that data into account.
The Future of Information in Public Spaces
Fans of science fiction such as the Black Mirror show, the novel The Dark Forest, or the film Minority Report could interpret this invention as the first step towards a public information oversaturation cataclysm. (Spoiler: We already live in that world, except we still have the power to “turn off our screens.”)
However, if this technology is prudently perfected, its advantages are obvious.
Passengers in transit would immediately find the information that concerns them, such as where to go to board their connecting flights. Both them and the airline would save time as a result.
The Parallel Reality Experience could also be implemented outside the airport. “Future applications of the technology could include stadiums, shopping centers, entertainment venues and more,” the spokespeople explained.
We’ll assume that one of our readers, perhaps you, is reading us from the near future. Some other reality where any shopping mall display can tell you where your missing child went; a mural at Disneyland can confirm your restaurant reservation time while givng you directions; or even Sphere can show you which bus to take to get to Fremont Street.
If that’s the case, now you know where that technology first took off.
Video (TL;DR)
Images: © Delta Air Lines.
