Android By Russell Holly Feb. 11, 2014 4:00 pm
Starting today, Upper Class Wing customers arriving into Heathrow Airport through Virgin Atlantic will be part of a six week experiment with Google Glass and Sony’s second generation smartwatch.
As we enter the second generation of smarter wearables for consumers, it seems like more and more companies are trying to see where this technology can make their employees work smarter. The idea is sound, basically making it possible to deliver information in a way that doesn’t require constantly pulling out a phone or constantly holding a tablet. Deployed correctly, there’s a good chance that most service environments could benefit from the kind of information delivery offered by wearables. For the next six weeks, Virgin Atlantic and aviation tech company SITA will team up to determine what works and what doesn’t when incorporating wearables into the Upper Class Wing.
For the uninitiated, Upper Class Wing customers aren’t flying like the rest of us. In fact, the scenario painted by SITA for these customers involves arriving in a chauffeured limousine at Heathrow’s T3 and being handled by a Virgin Atlantic concierge until it is time to board the plane. These concierges will be equipped with wearable technology to rapidly answer questions about weather or local events at their destination. Those equipped with Glass will be able to translate several languages thanks to the apps on board, and of course use the camera to grab QR codes for check-in. In theory, this means the concierge will never need to be behind the desk and will be able to more adequately assist their customers.
There’s some long term goals in the event that the experiment is successful, including the ability to access dietary and refreshment preferences after someone has checked in. This would be made possible through an app made available only to Virgin Atlantic employees for Glass and the Sony Smartwatch 2, which SITA has been working on. The app would essentially assign a concierge to a customer, and that concierge would have everything they need in the app to act as a personal assistant. It’s not something many of us are likely to experience for ourselves, but it’s clearly a situation to which wearable technology seems uniquely suited.
More...
As we enter the second generation of smarter wearables for consumers, it seems like more and more companies are trying to see where this technology can make their employees work smarter. The idea is sound, basically making it possible to deliver information in a way that doesn’t require constantly pulling out a phone or constantly holding a tablet. Deployed correctly, there’s a good chance that most service environments could benefit from the kind of information delivery offered by wearables. For the next six weeks, Virgin Atlantic and aviation tech company SITA will team up to determine what works and what doesn’t when incorporating wearables into the Upper Class Wing.
For the uninitiated, Upper Class Wing customers aren’t flying like the rest of us. In fact, the scenario painted by SITA for these customers involves arriving in a chauffeured limousine at Heathrow’s T3 and being handled by a Virgin Atlantic concierge until it is time to board the plane. These concierges will be equipped with wearable technology to rapidly answer questions about weather or local events at their destination. Those equipped with Glass will be able to translate several languages thanks to the apps on board, and of course use the camera to grab QR codes for check-in. In theory, this means the concierge will never need to be behind the desk and will be able to more adequately assist their customers.
There’s some long term goals in the event that the experiment is successful, including the ability to access dietary and refreshment preferences after someone has checked in. This would be made possible through an app made available only to Virgin Atlantic employees for Glass and the Sony Smartwatch 2, which SITA has been working on. The app would essentially assign a concierge to a customer, and that concierge would have everything they need in the app to act as a personal assistant. It’s not something many of us are likely to experience for ourselves, but it’s clearly a situation to which wearable technology seems uniquely suited.
More...
