VR PASSPORT

VR Passport is a multifunctional application that enhances virtual tourism and in-flight experiences, created by Justin Fanzo, Dhurv Rathod, Ruotong Cui, Yawen Xiao, and Shuixin Wang. Designed to make air travel more engaging—countering its often monotonous and uncomfortable nature—the app also provides financial value to the airline industry. Beyond entertainment, VR Passport fosters cultural exploration and preservation by inspiring travelers to discover new destinations and hidden cultural gems. Developed for Meta Quest 3 using Unity, the project won first place in the AeroSpatial Exploration Track at the MIT Reality Hack 2025.

PROBLEM ANALYSIS

Frustration During Turbulence

Many passengers experience anxiety about air travel, and turbulence can heighten feelings of discomfort and frustration.

Better Showcase of the Flight Path

Through interviews with a representative from Turkish Airlines, we identified an expectation from the airline to enable passengers to explore cities along the flight path, which they believe would significantly enhance the overall passenger experience.

Passengers Often Feel Bored During Flights

Because most airplanes do not offer Wi-Fi, passengers frequently experience boredom and seek more engaging or relaxing entertainment options while in the air.

SOLUTION

Meditation Function

To reduce passenger frustration and anxiety, we created a tranquil garden environment in VR, accompanied by guided breathing sounds and relaxing music to help passengers calm down.

Track Flight Path and Exploration

This feature visualizes the flight path with interactive nodes for the destination and cities along the route. Using VR glasses, passengers can experience 360-degree city tours and explore restaurant recommendations and scenic landmarks in immersive 3D.

Entertainment and Shopping

The entertainment section will offer VR games, movies, and TV shows. Through VR technology, passengers can also view products in 3D, enhancing the in-flight shopping experience while reducing boredom.

KEY SCREEN UI DESIGN

Openings

Discovery

MEDITATION SCENE BUILD

REFLECTION

Challenges

We ran into a number of development challenges throughout the hackathon, such as custom packages not working properly, scenes being too heavy, and version incompatibility issues, as well as several material-specific bugs in Unity. We managed to overcome these obstacles by collaborating together to address the issues and through the tremendous help or mentors who sat with us and helped us work through several of the issues.

What We Learned

We learned to leave more time for debugging and testing custom APIs and Unity packages to make sure that they will play nice with our project. We also learned that scoping is an iterative process, especially during hackathons, as there were times throughout the hackathon where we had to make design pivots or cut content and features out of the experience due to time constraints. Making those realizations early was important, as biting off more than we could chew would have surely derailed the project.

RUOTONG CUI

Multimedia Designer