Thursday, 10 April, 2025 UTC
Summary
Meta and Lufthansa's trial providing Quest 3 headsets to business class passengers won an airline industry award.
The scheme began in summer last year, and the two companies say that almost 4000 Lufthansa Allegris Business Class Suite customers have now tried it, with "overwhelmingly positive" feedback.
Lufthansa, Meta, and developer MSM.Digital won the 2025 Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) Award for Best Inflight Entertainment.
“We are thrilled with the success of this initiative and the positive feedback from our passengers", Lufthansa says. “Immersive technology is undoubtedly an element of future in-flight entertainment.”
Given this feedback, Meta says it's now “focused on expanding this offering to more airlines and optimizing our product suite.”
The Quest 3 headset on these flights features a streamlined launcher and comes preloaded with certain apps.
While Meta hasn't gone into detail about what exact apps are included, the company previously said the experience lets passengers:
• Enjoy an immersive cinema experience with select movies and TV shows
• Listen to prominent travel podcasters and see their stories come to life through spatial videos and select 360-degree video content
• Discover travel destinations from a bird’s-eye view with virtual sightseeing previews before you arrive
• Play interactive games like Connect Four and Chess
• Relax with active meditation exercises or enjoy a passive, lean-back experience
Quest 2 & Quest 3 Get Travel Mode For Use On Airplanes
Quest 2 and Quest 3 now have an “experimental” Travel Mode to make their positional tracking work on airplanes.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
The program is possible thanks to Travel Mode, a feature Meta added last year that makes the positional tracking of Quest headsets work in moving vehicles, including airplanes. Before Travel Mode, trying to use a Quest on a flight would result in all virtual objects and interfaces flying away in the opposite direction when the aircraft changed altitude, speed, or bearing - and when there was turbulence everything would violently shake. Apple Vision Pro also has a Travel Mode, since launch.
XR headsets are an ideal way to spend time while stuck in the air, letting you escape from your cramped physical surroundings into an enormous private space to watch movies, get work done, play games, or virtually visit interesting destinations. While these advantages are seeing more people buy a headset every year, providing one for passengers who don't own one yet is an interesting avenue, and we'll bring you any further developments from Lufthansa and other airlines as this scheme expands.