British Airways First Class VR
SUMMARY
Seeing the reputational uplift brought by exhibiting their updated Club Suite product for the A350-1000 in VR, British Airways have shown a further commitment to this technology by creating a stunning interactive experience for First Class aboard their Boeing 787 aircraft.
Seeing the reputational uplift brought by exhibiting their updated Club Suite product for the A350-1000 in VR, British Airways have shown a further commitment to this technology by creating a stunning interactive experience for First Class aboard their Boeing 787 aircraft.
CHALLENGE
British Airways were once again faced with the exciting challenge of how best to do justice to a glorious physical product, this time in the form of their First Class offering as seen on their Dreamliners, through their marketing. As part of a division-wide transformation of the way they showcase their brand, in no small part thanks to the celebrations surrounding their Centenary year, British Airways wanted to follow in the footsteps of their A350-1000 familiarisation and marketing project to create something equally spellbinding for trade shows, sales centres and PR touchpoints.
British Airways were once again faced with the exciting challenge of how best to do justice to a glorious physical product, this time in the form of their First Class offering as seen on their Dreamliners, through their marketing. As part of a division-wide transformation of the way they showcase their brand, in no small part thanks to the celebrations surrounding their Centenary year, British Airways wanted to follow in the footsteps of their A350-1000 familiarisation and marketing project to create something equally spellbinding for trade shows, sales centres and PR touchpoints.
The possible applications of Virtual Reality across British Airways are endless. In marketing, we are excited to continue exploration of how VR can bring our products, services and even destinations to life. We’re also very proud to be one of the first airlines to prove this technology’s potential, and it cements our commitment to innovation and the customer experience.
DAN TAYLOR, Content Manager — Brand and Marketing
SOLUTION
With VR fast becoming a mainstay across marketing, and extending its use cases into other pillars of the organisation, it seemed logical to once again pair a world-class product with a state-of-the-art medium. British Airways and Neutral Digital resumed their successful content partnership, creating a VR experience focusing on the quality and serenity enjoyed by First Class passengers in the skies. Staff and customers alike are now able to experience another luxury British Airways product in an involving and transformative way.
With VR fast becoming a mainstay across marketing, and extending its use cases into other pillars of the organisation, it seemed logical to once again pair a world-class product with a state-of-the-art medium. British Airways and Neutral Digital resumed their successful content partnership, creating a VR experience focusing on the quality and serenity enjoyed by First Class passengers in the skies. Staff and customers alike are now able to experience another luxury British Airways product in an involving and transformative way.
HOW
The primary challenge was to create an experience on par with the exclusiveness of a First Class experience, for this, we knew it had to be hyper-realistic.
Recreating every small detail, from screws to stitches, folds and cracks on materials and hyper-realistic 3D scanned food while ensuring it performed occupied the majority of the project timeline. To facilitate this, we performed a full-day survey of the aircraft taking thousand of pictures of every individual element and detail.
But, creating hyper-realistic assets is not enough to make the user feel like they are there, in person. To aid that, we took a lot of care creating natural hand poses so every object could be grabbed from multiple places and the hand would naturally adapt. To speed up this workflow we developed a system allowing the artists to author poses, in editor, directly on the objects so they had a realtime preview of how the hand was going to behave. Alongside this, was the ability to blend between poses, which not every user would notice, but would definitely feel — just one of the small details that adds to the immersiveness of the experience.
As well as hyper-realistic VR experience, the client required a ‘visualisation mode’ allowing British Airways’ marketing and content teams to capture and share stunning, high-quality real-time images within a huge variety of editing parameters. For this, we relied on some of the built-in UE tools, but, mainly the skill and craft of the artists that painstakingly recreated every detail.
Another challenge was UX, specifically how to present the VIP Lounges which required a navigation method that was intuitive but felt innovative, fresh and most importantly luxurious. For this, we placed a premium leather travel wallet in the hand of the user allowing them to pull tickets and VIP cards to access the various rooms and spaces.
The primary challenge was to create an experience on par with the exclusiveness of a First Class experience, for this, we knew it had to be hyper-realistic.
Recreating every small detail, from screws to stitches, folds and cracks on materials and hyper-realistic 3D scanned food while ensuring it performed occupied the majority of the project timeline. To facilitate this, we performed a full-day survey of the aircraft taking thousand of pictures of every individual element and detail.
But, creating hyper-realistic assets is not enough to make the user feel like they are there, in person. To aid that, we took a lot of care creating natural hand poses so every object could be grabbed from multiple places and the hand would naturally adapt. To speed up this workflow we developed a system allowing the artists to author poses, in editor, directly on the objects so they had a realtime preview of how the hand was going to behave. Alongside this, was the ability to blend between poses, which not every user would notice, but would definitely feel — just one of the small details that adds to the immersiveness of the experience.
As well as hyper-realistic VR experience, the client required a ‘visualisation mode’ allowing British Airways’ marketing and content teams to capture and share stunning, high-quality real-time images within a huge variety of editing parameters. For this, we relied on some of the built-in UE tools, but, mainly the skill and craft of the artists that painstakingly recreated every detail.
Another challenge was UX, specifically how to present the VIP Lounges which required a navigation method that was intuitive but felt innovative, fresh and most importantly luxurious. For this, we placed a premium leather travel wallet in the hand of the user allowing them to pull tickets and VIP cards to access the various rooms and spaces.
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