HeliView
HeliView the interactive travel search
Emotional travel search with spectacular sightseeing flights over hotels, beaches and sights.
Project description
Berlin, 2013 - With HeliView, Salim invented a unique and innovative virtual gateway to travel searches. The conventional presentation of travel offers in a list with small thumbnails was too emotionless for him and most of the time there was a lack of transparency about the location and surroundings of the hotel. When rummaging around, you couldn't tell whether a hotel a few kilometers away might be on a nicer bay or on a beautiful sandy beach.
The vision was to create a real interactive video view in which you can browse for travel offers in a playful way, like in gaming, and discover the surroundings from an aerial perspective.
With that the idea of HeliView was born. Imagine that in a video you are flying past the hotels in a helicopter from beach to beach. And above the hotels, the hotel price appears live in a clickable label in the video. By clicking on the label, the user can start a 360 ° flight over the respective hotel. So you can see every detail of the hotel's surroundings before booking. With HeliView, Salim managed to give vacation seekers full transparency. Whether a hotel was on a busy road or on a beautiful sandy beach or even on a cliff, the user quickly became aware of whether it was a hotel.
Kickback helicopter crash and restart.
Unfortunately there was also a tragic helicopter crash. Thank goodness the crew survived. But despite the setback, the project was further completed with a new helicopter. You can see the whole story here in the video Making of HeliView
Examples of operation
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Fly along the beaches
ButtonClick on the price tag above the hotel to start the scenic flight
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Challenge / technology
The challenge was to display the hotel price live within a video. So that the price always remains fixed over the hotel with the flight of the helicopter. For this purpose, Salim developed a new video technology together with the Fraunhofer Institute, the so-called "non-linear video", in which it was possible to import content from the Internet into the video in real time via API. At that time it was the world's first video technology that made this possible
Challenge / video content
The challenge was to display the hotel price live within a video. So that the price always remains fixed over the hotel with the flight of the helicopter. For this purpose, Salim developed a new video technology together with the Fraunhofer Institute - the so-called “non-linear video”, in which it was possible to import content from the Internet into the video in real time via API. At the time, it was the world's first video technology that made this possible.
Challenge / video content
The biggest challenge, however, was flying a helicopter over the hotels and along the beach and getting a stable image. The other challenge was to film the mass of holiday regions and hotels. Because in order to offer a complete travel search via interactive video, you need a certain number of beaches and hotels in order to reach the critical mass.
Salim and his team managed, step by step, within two years to sensationally fly over 15,000 hotels by helicopter and along thousands of beaches.
Overall, all beaches on Spain's coast, the islands of the Balearic and Canary Islands, Portugal's coasts, the Turkish Rivera, Egypt's coasts, the Greek islands and the island of Rügen were filmed entirely by helicopter.
Discover in the video the usecase, how the iPad app and HeliView interact with the Smart TV app
