If you have ever been in a long-haul flight (8 hours or more) in Economy Class, you would know that unless you are able to sleep all the way, the only thing that would keep you away from insanity is the so called InFlight Entertainment.  Depending on whom you are flying with, and which route you are taking, the system normally takes in a form of a screen attached in the back of a seat in front of you, or if you are unlucky, it will be a screen that comes down from the ceiling on top of every other rows that you must share with other passengers.  Typically you would be able to watch movies, listen to music or radio channels.  In a more advance unit, you could play some games, using the headset unit (which also function as a phone) as controller.  The movies usually are shown continuous play mode, you don’t usually have control over how the movies run.  So, if you want to watch one movie from the beginning, you need to wait until the current run finished, which also means, that if you want to watch a couple of movies in full, you need to prioritize your ‘playlist’.

At my recent long-haul flight though, I found a new breed of InFlight Entertainment that really blew me away.  This one is from the guys from Emirates.  They call this in-flight system, I.C.E, short of Information, Communication and Entertainment :)

Let’s start with the screen … the screen is a bright 10″ widescreen LCD!  Gone those blurry 5-7″ screen that I saw 3 years ago.  It’s now really a joy to watch movies on that screen.  The screen is really bright with a good contrast and vivid colour.

The next thing and this is for me quite an important one is that they are digital!  What I mean by this is that the media files are all in a digital form, probably stored in an array of hardisks somewhere in the plane, and served by a quite seemingly powerful media server.  The consequence of this is that, gone now the time when we had to schedule our ‘playlist’ perfectly so that we can watch or listen to what we want in a correct order.  Now we can pick anything we want, play it anytime we want, rewind it, fast forward it, or pause it, as you please!  It’s Freedom!  Think about the time when you were in the middle of a good part of a movie but you really needed to wee, well tough, you either had to wait until the end or miss the part.

Another thing that I thought was very cool and geeky was the Flight Information screen.  It used to be just a plain info on the speed, distance to the destination and outside temperature.  And then the upgraded it a bit with a flat map and the position of the plane on the map.  Now they are using something similar to Google Earth to show the position in 3D graphic.  Very cool!

On the communication side, apart from the usual telephony system, the system now featured a USB port where you can plug in your USB key and view Pictures and Documents that you have in your key.

And, more importantly maybe for ‘road warriors’, each seat has it’s own electricity plug!  Luxury :)

Again, I’m talking about Economy Class, here, not First or Business Class!

I managed to take some video of the ICE system, unfortunately it’s a bit blurry, I’m not sure why, but possibly because I was too close to the screen, and I was using just my Sony Ericsson phone to take the video, in a nervous mode, fretting that the stewardess would caught me doing it :)

So, apology for the bad quality, but I think you get the point, I hope :)

Part 1 is for the Information and Communication

Part 2 is for the Entertainment

Sadly, the new system seemed only being installed on particular type of Aeroplane and on a limited leg of journeys.  Because on the return flight, I was back with that crappy 7″

Disclaimer: I’m not an employee of Emirates, nor I’m in any affiliation with them. I’m just a happy customer :)

Yes, I’m a Geek, and the Matrix is there in my list of Top Geek Movies of all time (I haven’t actually made the list yet, but it’s a good idea).

This one, is there along with Starwars and Batman Lego.  Simply Genius!