Helsinki Airport has been trialling Microsoft HoloLens technology with the help of SITA Lab.

SITA’s research arm worked with Helsinki to reproduce its airport control centre in a mixed reality environment with a view to providing new insight into how the airport operates.

Mixed reality combines virtual and augmented reality to provide a view of an environment from a digital and physical aspect.

The HoloLens technology uses SITA’s Day of Operations technology feed to help the airport visualise a range of information including aircraft movement, passenger movement and retail information.

The project, which is not available as a live application, draws data from multiple sources such as passenger location, gate information, flight status and security wait times to provide a view of how the airport is functioning.

SITA says it’s early days for the technology with challenges such as size, weight and durability to take into account.

Jim Peters, chief technology officer for the airline and airport tech specialist says:

“Our early research shows that there are potential uses for airlines and airports – for operations, maintenance and training. We need to learn how to interact in this new environment.”

SITA now plans to take the “demonstrator” to the industry and find out which features airports want to use.

One of the potential benefits is to enable operations staff to pull up the application remotely, access live data and collaborate with people in the control centre.

There is also the potential to use the HoloLens in airport design going forward.

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Not augmented, not virtual – it’s mixed reality that changes the game