Over the past two years, the team at Safran Passenger Innovations (SPI) have been busy updating the capabilities of their core IFEC platform, RAVE OS, which started flying late 2021 and is now operating with six customers. The product launched with the concept of giving passengers a modern user experience, akin to that found on a commercial tablet or streaming application, with features such as Bluetooth, picture-in-picture and an intuitive and attractive user interface.
At APEX Expo 2022 in Long Beach, taking place on 25-27 October, the SPI team will be showcasing some of the features they will be launching in the next 12 months, including a third-party application platform that allows third-party developers to create apps that can run on RAVE. This platform provides more flexibility for customers, allowing them to deploy new IFEC applications to their system outside of the long software development lead times common in the industry, and to be in control of their own development.
The team will also be showcasing a couple of RAVE applications that have been developed using their own third-party tools, which they say will be deployed to customers very soon. The first app is Mobile Payments, which allows a passenger to purchase items onboard aircraft through the IFEC system and pay for them on their own mobile device using a credit card or a payment service such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.
The second app is the Advanced Survey app, which is a fully featured off-the-shelf survey application packaged using SPI’s third-party tools to make it available on RAVE. The package comes with a survey authoring tool that customers can use to make their own surveys and publish them to their entire fleet at any time, as well as offloading survey responses that can be imported into existing customer satisfaction tools.
“We are really excited to be able to bring these types of applications to IFEC without requiring long lead-time software development,” said Ben Asmar, vice president of products and strategy at SPI.
Other attractions at the SPI stand will include a content recommendations feature designed to be more engaging to passengers, and a Bluetooth spatial audio system that adds Sony’s 360 Reality Audio technology to RAVE IFE, in an exclusive partnership with WalkMix.com.