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girlwhowaspluggedout writes:
"Spike Aerospace has revealed how the Spike S-512, which is planned to be the first supersonic business jet, will be able to fly from New York to London in half the time that the flight requires now. The plane, which is expected to carry 12-18 passengers, will enjoy the reduced drag and lower weight that come with an advanced engine and no windows:" Read more below.
The new supersonic jet will feature a revolutionary windowless passenger cabin so no more glaring sun and no more shades to pull down or push up. Instead, the interior walls will be covered with a thin display screens embedded into the wall. Cameras surrounding the entire aircraft will construct breathtaking panoramic views displayed on the cabin screens. Passengers will be able to dim the screens to catch some sleep or change it to one of the many scenic images stored in the system.
Without windows, the S-512 is expected to reach speeds between Mach 1.6 and 1.8.
Dr Darren Ansell, an expert in space and aerospace engineering at the University of Central Lancashire, told BBC News what passengers in a plane without windows can expect to experience:
There will be no natural light it will all be simulated so it will be a bit like being in a tube. And how would it work from a safety perspective? If there was an accident how would you know which way the plane was facing, and where you had landed, when the cameras have failed?"
You just know that some imaginative hacker is going to have a field day with this..."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kebes on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:18PM
On the one hand, for most of the flight the plane will be cruising and so will be quite steady. It will be displaying images of distant objects, so the images will not be varying much from frame-to-frame. Moreover, since the image being displayed is 2D, most people will actually just perceive it to be like a still image/painting, and may not even associate it with being 'the outside world' (which, in fact, calls into question the reason for having these screens at all).
On the other hand, during tight manoeuvres and whenever there is turbulence, any slight mismatch between the movement of the images and the true movement of the cabin will indeed be unsettling (and worsen any motion sickness). Most people ignore the windows on an airplane except during takeoff and landing, when there is something interesting to actually look at. So, these viewscreens will be especially unsettling particularly during those times when people are most likely to want to look at them!
Hopefully they will do a bit of research inside flight simulators, and design their video frame-rate and latency to minimize such problems.
(Score: 1) by demonlapin on Saturday February 22 2014, @04:11PM