This week Delta launched a personalized flight monitor, its latest tool to make airport experiences smoother. The first deployment is at Detroit’s DTW airport in the McNamara Terminal. Most air travelers frequently consult the flight information display screens; many of us multiple times. With crowding around screens and an often overwhelming amount of information, frustration can set in—as such, Delta teamed up with Misapplied Sciences for a novel system for tracking your personal flight information: Parallel Reality.
Parallel Reality uses a kiosk, billboard and facial recognition, or a scan of a printed or digital boarding pass to display an individual’s personal flight information. What’s kind of mindblowing is that the person standing beside you will only sees their own—yours is not visible to them. In fact, no one else can see your information. The special screens can show up to 100 passengers’ personalized information at a time.
Each LED pixel can simultaneously display millions of different light rays. Once you’ve signed in, a sensor tracks you and sends your unique light rays your way. The only way anyone else can see your personized data is if they place their face against yours.
Greg Forbes (Managing Director of Airport Experience at Delta) says the new displays solve an old design problem, “The challenge of the flight information display, which has been around for absolutely decades, is a problem—for example, if you think about multi-languages. We tried to find ways where if you scan your boarding pass, it’ll highlight your information for a moment, things like that. But I think we hit the design limits of that form and now this is the next stage…I think everyone has that moment of dread. Those times where one thinks, “Maybe I got it wrong or I didn’t catch a gate change or something like that. You look 100 times to check, right? If we can give that moment of reinsurance, all the better.”
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