How we make moving maps: Bringing 3D Interactivity to the Cabin with a Moving Map that Wows

A tiny Airbus A350-1000 coasts across a 4K screen, its digital fuselage emblazoned with “Japan Airlines” in big, bold letters.

Using the seatback touchscreen, the passenger clicks around to explore. One view shows the time to destination, flight path, estimated time of arrival, and current local time. Another shows altitude, ground and air speed, and outside temperature.

As the passenger moves deeper into the map’s features, they encounter a simulated pilot’s head-up display, facts and trivia about cities and countries around the world, and 13-level pinch-to-zoom exploration of the terrain and city blocks. All of the screens are accented by Japan Airlines’ black and red brand palette.

This is Arc^TM, Panasonic Avionics’ “stunning” 3D interactive map, in action—a powerful and customizable application that has been wowing passengers around the world since its debut in 2019.

Keep reading to learn how Panasonic Avionics developed Arc, and how it continually evolves the popular map.

Arc’s origin story

After Airshow, the commercial airline industry’s first moving map unveiled its first map in the 1980s, the brand executed several industry-shaping innovations over the years, ultimately defining the market for in-flight entertainment and making the map a cornerstone of the passenger experience.

“Those innovations,” says Andrew Mohr, Vice President of Digital Solutions for Panasonic Avionics, have paid off. Today, it’s impossible to think of an in-flight experience without a moving map. “After a new Hollywood release, the map is usually the most viewed IFE service on an aircraft,” he adds.

Paul Sheldon, Product Line Manager of Digital Product Management at Panasonic Avionics shepherded the concept into a fully-fledged product.  “Some passengers like the map for its comforting and meditative qualities,” says Sheldon, “and others like it to get flight information or to explore the world from the cabin. Arc is more than a standard moving map, though. It’s not static or stale. Instead, it takes in-flight map innovation to a whole new level. We’re creating a unique, interactive map experience.”

How Arc is made

Arc’s high-definition 3D graphics and dozens of screen views are layered on top of sophisticated programming and design from the skilled team at Tactel in Malmö, Sweden, acquired by Panasonic Avionics nine years ago.

Tactel built Arc on top of millions of images acquired by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites and custom-built 3D graphics and gaming engines. Lisa Silfversten, Arc product owner at Tactel, explains that those massive images are then processed to remove clouds and other visual interference, and to optimize colors.

Once the images are processed, the fun begins: collating the images to develop base maps and then creating the 13 zoom levels, each with its own complex designs and stunning degrees of granularity, as well as a suite of other features. Those include fun world facts, topographical information, a flight simulator game, and a kid-friendly interactive map that lets users put dinosaurs back on the planet.

Sheldon says the dinosaurs are part of making the cabin inclusive to everyone. “Kids are often overlooked when considering onboard customer experience design,” he says. But with the interactive dinosaur component, “we could have a dinosaur flying from LA to Dubai and tell you how fast the pterodactyl is flying,”

Kids (and other dino enthusiasts) can use Panasonic’s new Premium Handset (PHS)—an in-seat controller available on some airlines that looks and feels like a smartphone—to interact with the dinos. This combo makes the feature Silfversten’s favorite part of Arc. “You can click on the dinosaurs and feed them,” she says, smiling.

A passion for bespoke in-flight tech

Silfversten, who studied data science engineering at Lund University and who did her Master’s thesis at Tactel, says she’s learned a lot about merging data, engineering, and design while working on Arc.

“We use so many different technologies—Android development, web development, 3D engines, interactive design,” she says. The Tactel team uses those technologies and skills to make custom in-flight entertainment graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and other solutions, in addition to maintaining and evolving Arc.

Their creative, out-of-the-box thinking is in part owed to the close relationships Tactel maintains with local universities and technical schools. Having access to early-career designers and engineers helps drive imagination and concepts and ensures Tactel is always up on tech trends.

“One thing I love is that I’m not looking at a product that looks like it was built specifically for the airline industry,” says Mohr. “I’m looking at a product that I would be proud to show in a car, or to a company like Apple. It shows what can be done when trained designers use professional design practices with a mainstay of inflight entertainment..”

The team’s wide range of skills and interests allow Panasonic Avionics to offer a high degree of customization to its customers, including branding, custom configurations, and unique features. For instance, Panasonic responded to an airline’s request for religious information displaying the precise location of Mecca and timing cues on when to start and stop fasting during Ramadan. That’s on top of the custom -colored palette used on the in-flight system to mirror the airline’s branding.

Sheldon also points to the Tactel team’s work for Japan Airlines (JAL) as an example of Tactel’s ingenuity.

The airline—a longtime partner of Panasonic—recently unveiled its brand-new Panasonic Avionics IFEC system on its 13 new A350-1000s. The system is delivered on our NEXT series hardware and includes in-flight Wi-Fi, Live Television, a custom Arc experience, and an “image streamer” that Sheldon and Silfversten describe as a type of pop-up view of the live map that can be viewed while playing other content on the seatback touchscreen. Tactel also engineered and designed JAL’s interactive IFE portal, maximizing integrations across the platform.

Arc is continually evolving, becoming more creative, sophisticated, and responsive all the time. New integrations and functions are on the horizon—some of which will be useful in raising airlines’ ancillaries—as are new partnerships with customers looking to make Arc their own.

Continual evolution

As its proud product owner, Sheldon remarks “I can’t wait to see how airlines will customize and configure what we’ve built for them. Just as maps themselves naturally evolve, so too do passengers’ expectations around what maps enable. We want to give airlines the platform to surpass those expectations.”

To further leverage IFE in realizing deeper passenger engagement, airlines are assembling various digital offerings beyond just the latest blockbuster movies. Maps can play a huge role in the user experience, and Arc’s map services technology allows for map information to be weaved in throughout the interactive.  These services fuel Panasonic’s Modular Interactive product, the industry’s first interactive authoring tool, to help airlines easily and quickly design such an experience.

Arc is even more impressive when paired with Astrova’s high-definition 4K OLED screens, whose true-to-life colors and crisp images help immerse passengers into the in-flight experience. Want to see it for yourself? Reach out to our Arc sales team for a demo.