October saw the launch of Neutral Digital’s latest VR experience, showcasing Cathay Pacific’s new A350 cabin, including their economy, premium economy and business class cabins. Cathay Pacific and Neutral Digital collaborated to design and implement a VR storyboard that would show the prospective passenger visual and interactive highlights beginning with the livery, and onto the cabin.
Neutral Digital created a narrative to encourage full exploration of the Cathay Pacific experience by means of gamification, allowing users to progress through the cabin by role-playing as crew, eventually earning their wings as “pilots” in the interactive cockpit by completing a series of challenges. Fancy landing an A350?
This well defined storyboard is a relatively new addition to the VR space and makes the entire experience a lot more interactive, it’s also one of Neutral Digital’s defining touch points. That and a wealth of Easter eggs, encouraging users to fully explore each cabin.
From being able to plate dishes at your seat, to throwing whatever you like across the cabin, the experience has a lot of freedom for users to explore their environment. But the most impressive element and something that is relatively new to this new medium, is the ability to offer crews familiarisation to new aircraft models, cutting down the requirement for physical mock-ups and waiting for aircraft to enter in to service.
What Neutral Digital has managed to do is offer such high-quality renderings that the user genuinely feels like they are in the cabin, this isn’t some year 2000 VR experience. This level of detail, even in a cockpit, means that the application for these products can go much further than just a simple marketing product, but with some simple tweaks, could heavily reduce initial training costs for cadets and pilots and cabin crew in type training. It seems Neutral Digital should have a fantastic future, as the products it creates have endless applications.
TheDesignAir 