FlightpathLabs was created as a means to research and experiment with early-stage technologies that span Cloud, Mobile, Big Data, 3D Visualization, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence.
WHAT WE THINK
Mobile
Platform and device disruption is the new normal and innovation is the answer
In Brief
Apps today and especially maps need to run on all your aircraft, passenger devices and ground systems. Providing a consistent passenger experience across multiple aircraft types, which may be equipped with different systems, is becoming ever more important for airlines as they continue to elevate their brand and differentiate their inflight service from the competition.
The new norm is to design and deploy apps that are available as an
Android, iOS or Linux app,
Stream as web service or API, or
As a widget to embed in other applications
FlightPath3D runs on over one hundred million devices
“We scaled our map to over 100 million devices by delivering it an Android, iOS or Linux app as well as streaming it as a web service in other applications”
Duncan Jackson
President, FlightPath3D
Big Data
A staggering 90% of the world's data was created in the last 2 years
In Brief
Big data has tremendous potential to enhance the passenger experience and is one of the most important trends driving the evolution of air travel today.
If leveraged properly it has the power to:
Create a personalized inflight service by harnessing billions of social experiences
Predict demand for specific flights by learning passenger desires
Generate ticket sales and ancillary revenue
Our algorithm uses over 100 Billion social records to rank 400,000 landmarks
“See what is trending in any neighborhood”
Jon Norris
VP Marketing, FlightPath3D
Artificial Intelligence
Predictive analytics and AI at the heart of route and network planning
In Brief
Network planning requires real-time market reaction to provide valuable insight to passenger demand and statistics. Airlines need to showcase routes and allow passengers to plan their next trip in-flight while they have time and are wrapped in the brand experience. It’s easier and faster to plan a trip visually so give passengers the experience to view and play with routes right from their seat and capture all their interactions.
Data captured from passenger interactions from trip planning and route searches can provide:
Insight to passenger desire and future travel intentions
Rankings for specific route and destination categories
follow on e-commerce and booking opportunities
Route map analytics provides insight to future passenger flight demand
“Passenger searches will help airlines plan routes and rank destinations”
Boris Veksler
CEO, FlightPath3D
Geolocation
Integrating location experiences will supercharge your IFE
In Brief
With API's and SDK create flexible experiences integrating the map anywhere. Integrating map data into the IFE GUI or external data into the map is table stakes.
API’s have the ability to
Integrate content and augmented reality with 2D and 3D visualization
Integrate directions and routing for destination and airport services
Showcase travel services within street and satellite imagery
With API's create flexible experiences integrating the map anywhere
“Our API capabilities have been used in over 50 Airline implementations”
Marat Khamidoulov
Software Architect, FlightPath3D
LABS PROJECTS SHOWCASE
We iterate through a variety of lean experiments and if we land on something we make it happen.
Project Title
Calculate Aircraft to Hotel or Home Journey Times
Project Synopsis
Receive an input designating a ground-based destination such as passengers home or hotel and request for an available ground-based travel option, and display an estimated time of arrival to the ground-based destination based on first data stored on-board the aircraft for the second mode and real-time flight information for the aircraft.
Working collaboration with API’s and product team at Uber.
Project Outputs
Travel Planner application that calculates journey times from flight to ground-based destination.
Real-time multimodal travel estimation and routing system patent.
Project Title
Flight Instrument Data Stream Layer in Live Aircraft Camera Feed
Project Synopsis
Landscape cameras are encased to withstand the structural constraints of flight and are mounted on the aircraft. Create a seamless integration of pilot instrument and flight data with aircraft cameras overlaid into the camera’s live feed to create an augmented realt pilot experience. Working with Latécoère camera leadership and engineering teams.
Project Outputs
Live Pilot application.
Project Title
Filtering Political Sentiment in Public Data for Landmarks, Place Names and other geo-specific data sets
Project Synopsis
Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion Artificial Intelligence) and the use of natural language processing and text analysis to identify elements in content that an individual airline could object to. This automation scales against large data sets.
Project Outputs
Content filtering engine that supports rules that filter large data sets with particular keywords or sentiments in the body of a creative element including text and image files.
Project Title
Geospatial 3D Rendering in a Browser
Project Synopsis
3D tiles are massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets, used to stream 3D content, such as landmasses and vector data. They define a spatial data structure and a set of tile formats designed for 3D. Rending these massive data set in a browser for 3D web visualization on any device. The internet will go three dimensional.
Project Outputs
3D HTML Moving Map with fast and responsive visualization speeds that supports classic 3D navigation controls for Pan, Tilt and Zoom. It feels like a native application.
Project Title
Gate and Connecting Flight Finder App using Android
Project Synopsis
Location finder android application to be used in airports to locate gate to gate walk times and directions or gate to luggage or ride share pickup. When a user selects any point in an airport app present detailed directions, walk times and 3D airport map. Leverage cloud, mobile and 3D imagery algorithms analyzing massive data sets for distance and walk times from any point to and point in an airport.
Project Outputs
FlyMe project and Airport Map application. Mapping all airports in world and connecting the retail potential from the stores and a directory inflight for all products and services when you land with connecting gate data and walk times to all services.
Project Title
Predictive Analysis of Flight Demand
Project Synopsis
Capture passenger sentiment to forecast interest in specific route and destinations. Use a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning, that analyze current and historical passenger desires for flights to make predictions about future flight demand.
Project Outputs
Where We Fly Interactive Route Map application.
PROJECT LEARNINGS
1. Cool ideas are not enough
People conflate innovation with creativity.
While creativity is an important ingredient in innovation, just ‘coming up with cool ideas’ is not enough for innovation to be sustainable. You need to combine creative ideas with viable business models, that solve real problems to come to a sustainable business model.
We recognize that if we don’t isolate engineering resources to focus on new customer problems with the freedom to try new things and use customers to drive new ideas we won’t evolve.
We take an idea and build the first version of a minimal viable product and bring it to a handful of customers and listen to what they say and then go back and re-do things completely.
2. Treat failure as learning
In today’s ever-changing world, nobody can predict what business is going to look like in 5 years. It is important to adapt to change and you have to take the risk that something might not work. Treating failure as an opportunity to learn is part of adapting.
Optimize for early failure, and fast learning, even if that means no immediate return on investment.
One challenge we faced in our labs is deciding when to declare defeat. The human tendency is to hope for the best and try to avoid failure at all costs.
The slogan “Fail often in order to succeed sooner” is easy to say. We have in some cases doubled down on technology and not given up because it's part of our vision.
For example it took multiple attempts to perfect the rendering of Geospatial 3D Rendering in any Browser without needing any additional plug-ins or hogging processing power.
We feel we had no choice but to figure this out given our belief that platform and device disruption is the new normal.
3. Have a clear vision
When passion aligns with your vision, great products are built. You need to state a clear vision and be willing to defend it against the competition, customers and employees.
We believe in our vision and that the future of the inflight experience is where passengers can:
Duncan Jackson, President of FlightPath3D giving the Big Data keynote address at the APEX Technology Conference in January 2019
Estimate journey times to your hotel or home from the sky
View personal arrival and departure gates with your customized walk time and your directions
Watch what the pilot sees with augmented reality cockpit window view
Buy event and ticket deals for last minute shows and games in close proximity to your destination
Create a personal travel guide using socially ranked recommendations powered by big data
Request a ride or share with another passenger ground transportation
Reserve a dinner table, tour or hotel in your destination
Explore destinations in a full aerial 360 panoramic experience
4. Collaborate and get involved
The success of innovation relies on getting the right people involved. An effective group is comprised of individuals from different departments within the company, partners and customers.
When we develop a new product we include customers and partners with people from design, engineering, sales, marketing, and support. Get out and touch new technology.
FlightPath3D takes on the Terminators in 3D VR
APIs
Integrating location experiences will supercharge your IFE
With API's and SDK create flexible experiences integrating the map anywhere. Integrating map data into the IFE GUI or external data into the map is table stakes.
API’s have the ability to:
- Integrate content and augmented reality with 2D and 3D visualization
- Integrate directions and routing for destination and airport services
- Showcase travel services within street and satellite imagery
PATENTS
Overview
Description
ONBOARD LOCATION-BASED INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT AND INFORMATION
Patent#: 8,594,931
Abstract
Techniques are described herein for generating a moving map that includes a graphical representation of a vehicle, such as an airplane, and content relevant to a location of the vehicle as the vehicle is in transit. An in-route entertainment server that serves the moving map may be onboard the vehicle or offboard the vehicle. The moving map may display the current location of the vehicle displayed by modifying a delayed location of the vehicle to account for a speed, a heading, and an amount of delay. Content items may be included on the moving map if they are within a bounded region around the location of the vehicle or in the vehicle. Content items may also be included if they are associated with a region that overlaps the bounded region. The bounded region changes as the vehicle moves in transit.
Overview
Description
LOCATION-BASED IN-ROUTE ENTERTAINMENT AND INFORMATION
Patent#: 8,762,047
Abstract
Techniques are described herein for generating a moving map that includes a graphical representation of a vehicle, such as an airplane, and content relevant to a location of the vehicle as the vehicle is in transit. An in-route entertainment server that serves the moving map may be onboard the vehicle or offboard the vehicle. The moving map may display the current location of the vehicle displayed by modifying a delayed location of the vehicle to account for a speed, a heading, and an amount of delay. Content items may be included on the moving map if they are within a bounded region around the location of the vehicle or in the vehicle. Content items may also be included if they are associated with a region that overlaps the bounded region. The bounded region changes as the vehicle moves in transit.
Overview
Description
REAL-TIME MULTIMODAL TRAVEL ESTIMATION AND ROUTING SYSTEM
Patent#: 9,989,370
Abstract
A real-time multimodal travel estimation and routing system having a first mode for air-based travel and a second mode for ground-based travel, and a method for estimating a time of arrival to a ground-based destination having a first mode for air-based travel and a second mode for ground-based travel is disclosed. The real-time multimodal travel estimation and routing system is configured to receive an input designating a ground-based destination, a request for an available ground-based travel option, and display an estimated time of arrival to the ground-based destination based on first data stored on-board the aircraft for the second mode and real-time flight information for the aircraft for the first mode. The system is further configured to receive an update of real-time information for the available ground-based travel option and update the first data stored on-board the aircraft.
Overview
Description
ORGANIZING PLACES OF INTEREST IN-FLIGHT
Patent Application#: 16368842
Abstract
A time-sensitive, data reduction system is described which facilitates a personalized passenger experience onboard an aircraft. According to an aspect of the system, a method is disclosed of presenting, to a passenger on an aircraft, points of interest (POIs). The method comprises: receiving at least a portion of an airline-specific dataset, wherein the airline-specific dataset comprises a plurality of location records, wherein each location record comprises a point of interest (POI) and a unique rank, wherein the POI is defined by unique geographic identifier; determining a current position of the aircraft; and based on the current position and based on the unique rank of each of the plurality of location records, controlling, at a passenger display in the aircraft, a presentation of a map and a plurality of POI indicators associated with a highly-ranked subset of the plurality of location records. According to another aspect of the system, a plurality of servers are used provide relevant location-related content to an aircraft passenger.
