For many people flying is a big problem. If you aren’t flat out scared of flying, chances are sitting in a confined chair with limited things to do for hours on end isn’t your thing. Well it looks like wearable technology could be an answer to that problem.
Chances are that you already use wearable technology on flights when you use headphones to listen to music or watch movies. But other technology could be on its way to make flights a lot more bearable. SITA Lab is currently looking at ideas to make the long waits and hours of boredom much better for people traveling via airlines.
SITA itself is a firm that develops technology specifically for air travel, and they recently published a report about how wearable technology could greatly improve the experience. And this tech isn’t just for the traveler, it’s also for the people who work with the airline to help make things much more efficient.
For example, they proposed a combination of Google Glass and the Vuzix M100, which would be a head-up display coupled with a scanner that would verify tickets and passports simply by looking at them. This system worked in SITA Labs when they were testing it, but to be used on a much larger scale would be a little harder.
Another thing that was being tested in SITA labs is the use of a wearable tech for crew inside the plane to help make getting ready for takeoff and landing more efficient.
Besides being used for entertainment, wearable tech for the passenger could be used to display things like flight delays and travel times, and even be used for things like real time translation, which can often be handy in an international setting.
Clearly all this tech for airport and airline is still a long way off, especially because of the costs that would be associated with it. Despite this, we could see some lower cost implementations of wearable technology in the field of air travel within the next couple of years, especially because of the studies that the team at SITA Lab have done.
The fact that airline travel is currently such a long and often stressful ordeal should push airlines to move foreword in the technology that they use.
