If bigger seats and nicer nosh in British Airways' First Class still aren't enough, would sir like to wear some VR goggles? Good news for well-heeled British Airways customers! Now you can transport yourself away from the carrier's aircraft interior through the wizardry of Virtual Reality. Sadly, the idiot visors only get handed out on the aeroplane so will be of little use to those left to endure the consequences of whatever IT issue has befallen …
One of my customers makes the 'seats' for business / first class seats. Not sure I can call them seats exactly rather than amazingly engineered works of art. I doubt I could ever afford to sit in one on a flight but the showroom models I have tried are almost a comfy as my sofa. Flatscreen TV, motorised adjustment, some of them even turn into a small bed. They also weigh less than my office chair.
As stated in the article give it to cattle class, the only issue being the lack of USB chargers in the cheap seats. If it has noise cancelling headphones :o
While the rich are stuck in the VR world they aren't asking for expensive champagne refills and bothering the crew. It's a good investment. Cattle class will similarly probably soon get drip fed sedatives/legal highs, so they too don't bother the stewards and they can have one person looking after them all.
"I guess that is what they charge, not what they cost?"
You'd be amazed how much engineering work goes into a *cattle* class seat; they have to be light, extremely durable, and are supposed to remain intact and attached to the rails in the floor in the event of a (survivable) crash. The manufacturer has to be able to show calculations (or tests!) to prove this. Business class seats have similar requirements but more bells and whistles.
With business class seats, there is a likelyhood that some parts of the design are used for a single combination of aircraft and buyer, because they will want *their* seats to look different from other airlines too, so each design might only be manufactured for a few thousand seats. Small(ish) batch sizes lead to big costs when you have to have unique tooling for each batch because each customer wants a slightly different curved shape.
> I guess that is what they charge, not what they cost? Materials and labour are probably tiny.
Yet again a Reg commenter has ignored the cost of research, development, design, testing and tooling, and failed to appreciate the relatively low number of units these costs are shared across.
You can only approximate design and tooling costs to zero if you're making millions of units.
Long flights have USB chargers in freight class too. You don't want all the passengers getting grumpy when their phone dies and they have to switch to the barely-working seat screen showing heavily edited movies from last year. That's why I'm not buying a phone without a headphone jack until there's a second USB-C port to enable charging while listening.
Hang the VR. While reading this article, I can almost taste the airplane cabin. "The distressing stains left by the last disappointed passenger" indeed!
I'd be happy if the nauseous passengers are all in First. Those of us who are easily nauseated will appreciate the distance.
This post has been deleted by its author
BA are adding an extra row of benches to Cattle Class. With a 27in Thigh Bone that is going to make travel of more than 1-2 hours impossible for me.
Bloody Awful if you ask me.
Mind you most other airlines are not much better for those suffering in steerage.
"Incidentally, you can fly to New York's JFK airport in British Airways First Class tomorrow for £9,443 (according to the company's website). Or you could do it in Economy for £1,581"
I know someone who used to have business trips out to the Gulf area when British Caledonian were still independant and competing with BA ... this was also in the days when you could transfer tickets from one airline to another (I assume there was some inter-aitrline mechanism for reconciling the revenues). He said back in those days the trick was for the flight back to the UK to buy an economy ticket on one airline and then at the airport go to the other's checkin and say that you'd switch to them if there was an upgrade to business class available - this was pretty much guaranteed as the route was over supplied with both BA and BCal running parallel flights. After this you then went back to the original airline to suggest that oif there was an upgrade to first class available (again normally possible) then you'd not switch to the rivals. He said he once asked the in-flight crew why the airline did this and was told that basically as far as the airline was concerned once you'd paid to get on the plane then wherever you sat didn't really affect their revenue so even if, as he said happened on occasions, you sat in first class with passengers in that cabin outnumbered by stewardesses it made no difference to the airlines bottom line that you'd actually only paid for an economy ticket.
1080p res? Welcome to 2016 and a lovely screen door effect.Sounds like one company has found a way to clear out their warehouse of crappy old headsets. First class better stock up on headache tablets and sick bags if the refresh is as crappy.
VR is looking at 2880 x 1600 (QHD) now for a good headset and some are 4k. It's not the same a screen size and it makes a huge difference.
It is only selected flights from Heathrow to JFK. And when you read the small print it is only one flight, BA117, on selected days.
I am flying LHR-JFK in first tomorrow, but not on BA117, so no chance of getting to see how bad the headsets are. Oh well, I will just hit the champagne doubly hard to compensate. Maybe next time I will book BA117 instead.
If these headsets are 1920x1080 per eye then there are 1920 pixels for the horizontal field of view - approximately 100 degrees.
A cinema screen doesn't occupy the entire field of view. Instead it is ~30 degree view for comfort. So any virtual screen playing in your VR headset has an effective resolution of 576 pixels in the horizontal. The vertical FOV is greater so typically VR headsets have more pixels in the vertical but this doesn't appear to be the case here so the vertical pixels will be stretched.
So people travelling in premier class are going to be sorely disappointed with the quality of these headsets. Movies aren't going to look very good at all, probably even worse looking than standard definition. On top of that they might suffer screen door effect and other VR effects. I think these gimmicks will enjoy a very short novelty factor before people start just watching films on their normal entertainment screens.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
