USA. Terminal management company JFKIAT, travel retailer Paradies Lagardère and PeriscapeVR have opened a Virtual Reality (VR) Experience Center at New York JFK Airport Terminal 4. The partners said it was the first VR experience of its kind at an airport.
The six-month pop-up aims to provide immersive virtual and mixed reality experiences to the terminal’s 70,000 travellers a day. The unit is located in the T4 Retail Lounge and features freestanding VR Towers with 12 stations. Pricing ranges from US$1 to US$2 per minute and experiences average 5 to 10 minutes each. The Experience Center, noted the partners, is “a scalable installation that brings a luxurious and accessible entertainment option to mass audiences in high-profile locations anywhere”.
“We are thrilled to partner with PeriscapeVR to bring the first airport VR Experience Center offering location-based entertainment to travellers at Terminal 4,” said JFKIAT Vice President of Commercial Edward Midgley. “With more than 21 million annual passengers traveling across six continents, Terminal 4 is the perfect location to offer this amenity. T4 strives to provide passengers with the best experiences possible and PeriscapeVR will give travellers something new to enjoy while at the airport.”
The experiences are grouped into five content categories: “First Time”; “Experience”; “Create”; “Play”; and “Cause” and feature exclusive content from leading brands in virtual reality. The experiences have been curated, said JFKIAT, to appeal to a wide variety of travellers. They allow them to view new destinations and to draw and create in 3D, to personify a famous musician, play games and more.
“PeriscapeVR, meaning ‘escape within,’ was created for travellers who desire a fun, blissful and euphoric respite from airport crowds and long hours between flights. As a frequent traveller, I recognised there was a gap in the market for this kind of airport entertainment, and I am delighted to be bringing PeriscapeVR to JFK T4,” said PeriscapeVR Founder & CEO Lynn Rosenthal.
The VR Experience Center features HP Windows Mixed Reality Headsets for immersion into virtual worlds, as well as HP Z240 Tower Workstations to provide the required performance for immersive VR experiences, noted PeriscapeVR. The centre also features design by Gensler Architects.
“HP is proud to have been chosen to power the virtual reality technology needs of PeriscapeVR for its groundbreaking experience at one of the world’s most visited airports,” said HP Global Head of Virtual Reality, Location Based Entertainment Joanna Popper. “We are thrilled to offer travellers the innovation, creativity and escape of virtual reality, and excited that they will experience this content through HP’s technology.”
The JFK T4 installations in more detail:
- First Time: theBlu: Whale Encounter, Reef Migration and Luminous Abyss –An undersea encounter with the whale, through which travellers can witness an undersea migration on the edge of a coral reef, venture into the deepest region of the ocean and discover an iridescent abyss.
- Experience: Irrational Exuberance – A journey to imaginary worlds as a lone explorer in deep space. The user can discover and interact with deep space phenomena through different sensations.
- Create: MasterpieceVR: Shape your Creativity – The traveller can build tangible objects, colourful environments, and high-quality 3D models with VR’s sculpting and painting tool
- Play: Fruit Ninja and AudioShield – Fruit Ninja VR turns gameplay into a virtual reality experience for players of all ages and skill levels.. AudioShield brings music to life, allowing participants to interact with music in a new, physical way, using shields to block incoming orbs.
- Social Cause: Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness – Described as a “magical and mesmerising VR journey into the foreign land of the sightless”. Based on John Hull’s sensory and psychological experience of blindness, the interactive experience uses binaural audio and real-time 3D animations to create an immersive journey through a “world beyond sight.”
