Monday, October 19, 2009

Travel at your fingertips

As a special interactive experience for the exhibition visitors at fvw congress in Cologne Sept 2009, TravelTainment (an Amadeus-owned subsidiary) presented online consultancy and booking using Microsoft's Surface Table.

Microsoft Surface is a revolutionary multi-touch computer that responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects, helping people interact with digital content in a simple and intuitive way. With a large, horizontal user interface, Surface offers a unique gathering place where multiple users can collaboratively and simultaneously interact with data and each other.

Travel agencies can soon offer advice to customers using Microsoft Surface Tables as a new central element for sales and consultancy. This is how its done: The customer and the travel agent operate the computer user interface hands-on and navigate to the destination area from a map of the world. Hotels and sights layers are shown on the map and further information and image material from the TravelTainment multimedia content is shown. Then, the chosen destination is sent directly to the TT BistroPortal from an interface on the travel agents PC.

See in action below the Traveltainment layer on Google Maps and MS SurfaceTable.