VR Passport

Inspiration

We were inspired to improve the in-flight experience for passengers on airplanes, as air travel is notoriously boring, monotonous, and uncomfortable for many. We also wanted to find a way to bring financial value to the airline industry while offering a product that helps promote cultural exploration and preservation by inspiring guests to visit new places and discover unique cultural sites that normally fly under the radar.

What it does

VR Passport is a multi-function application that offers unique virtual tourism and an enjoyable in-flight experience in the following ways:

-It allows guests to virtually visit their destination city in advance and explore a variety of recommended locations and experiences that are based on a pre-flight survey that guests can fill out. Each virtual location includes factoids and key identifying info, as well as any information related to getting the most out of the experience, such as pre-ordering tickets, recommendations for best time to go, etc.

-It also allows guests to virtually visit cities that they are flying over and do the same things described above. The VR Passport app tracks the flight path, and on the flight path visualization, guests will see nodes for other cities that Turkish Airlines flies to along the flight path. Guests can click on those nodes and immediately be transported to the very cities that they're flying over in virtual reality.

-Finally, VR Passport turns the in-flight journey into a riveting and magical experience. The virtual meditation garden allows guests to escape into a tranquil space of beautiful foliage and relaxing music. The app also creates fantastic moments for guests, such as a dragon from Turkish mythology flying in the sky next to the plane in mid-flight.

How we built it

We built the experience for Meta Quest 3 using Unity.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a number of development challenges throughout the hackathon, such as custom packages not working properly, scenes being too heavy, and version incompatibility issues, as well as several material-specific bugs in Unity. We managed to overcome these obstacles by collaborating together to address the issues and through the tremendous help or mentors who sat with us and helped us work through several of the issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how much of the overall experience that we were able to create, as well as the breadth of content that we were able to show off in the demo. We are also proud of our ability to overcome the various obstacles that arose throughout development!

What we learned

We learned to leave more time for debugging and testing custom APIs and Unity packages to make sure that they will play nice with our project. We also learned that scoping is an iterative process, especially during hackathons, as there were times throughout the hackathon where we had to make design pivots or cut content and features out of the experience due to time constraints. Making those realizations early was important, as biting off more than we could chew would have surely derailed the project.

What's next for VR Passport

We would love to keep working on the project and possibly add enhancements and additional features before maybe pitching the idea to Turkish Airlines or any other potential clients who might be interested!