PARIS — At the Paris Air Show, many companies were using 3-D virtual reality imaging to promote their products. Boeing hit upon a particularly cool version as a marketing tool, handing out Google Cardboard devices to visitors.
This is a virtual reality invention from the wizards of Silicon Valley that, in a mind-bending high-tech twist, is made mostly out of cardboard.
The cardboard is cut into a precise foldable shape with a couple of embedded lenses and magnets. It folds into something like a eye-covering visor, which you wear like a mask, secured with a rubber band.
You download an app to your mobile phone and then mount the phone in the visor, so that when you put it on, you are looking at your phone screen right up against your eyes through this weird cardboard contraption.
The result is magical!
To promote virtual reality as a technology, Google has made the invention free for anyone to use and produce their own version. So Boeing and China Airlines got together to produce a 3-D video showing off the new 777-300ER that was on display at the Air Show all week.
More elaborate virtual reality goggles — hardware by Samsung, and “powered by Oculus” — were also available to view the tour, but not to take home.
At a press gathering at Boeing’s Paris hotel, journalists got to try it out.
With earphones plugged into the phone and the Oculus VR goggles over my face, the hotel conference room immediately disappeared and I began a stunning 3-D virtual tour of the Boeing airplane.
The tour was a fixed video. I couldn’t wander at will. But as it played, I could move my head and look all around me, immersed in this virtual world in full 3-D.
It was disorienting at first to be standing in a room, occasionally brushing against someone watching me — the real world around me at that moment — but to see all around me this video of another, virtual world.
As music swelled in the headset, I toured the outside of the 777, looking closely at the engines, then climbed the stairs to see the Taiwanese carrier’s beautifully designed and luxurious cabin interior. It features warm earth colors and the aesthetics of the Song dynasty.
As the images unfolded and I swiveled my head this way and that, I swayed several times as my sense of balance became confused and I had to reach out and hold onto a table to steady myself.
One really odd part of the experience, which lasted three minutes or so, was that the 3-D video at various moments included close-ups that made the interior gigantic. At those times, it felt as if I were the size of a small child moving through a very large world, wondering how to climb up on a huge airplane seat.
Boeing gave away several thousand of the cardboard packs at Le Bourget. All visitors had to do was download the app from Google or Apple to their phones, stick the phone in the visor, and play.
Boeing and Google technology, together with ancient Chinese artfulness, all brought together with a piece of cardboard. Wow.
