Maybe you are familiar with those ticket booking systems where, at some point during the purchase flow, you have to choose a seat. This is usually done when selling tickets for games, movies, flights or concerts. Wouldn’t it be cool to have some kind of “realistic” preview of the seat, i.e. see the stage or screen from the perspective of the space you chose? Of course it would 🙂 This is the kind of question that resulted into a new experiment which we’d like to share with you today.

Attention: Some of the techniques we are using are very experimental and won’t work in all browsers. Support for transform-style: preserve-3d is necessary for this demo.

So the idea is to show some kind of cinema room where we can choose seats from a seating plan. When choosing a seat, we’ll move to the respective position in the room and allow the user to see the real view from the chosen place. There is also a button in the center of the page that allows to unlock the rotation of the viewer, something that is quite important for a realistic view considering that we can rotate and tilt our heads.

The trailer that we use in the demo is from Sintel, an animated movie by The Blender Foundation. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Initially, we show a trailer box with the info of the movie and the option to choose the seats:

When we choose to select the seats, we’ll move the view to the back of the cinema room and show the seating plan:

Once a seat is clicked, the view moves to the respective position:

The little icon in the center of the screen allows for unlocking the view, i.e. allowing for the viewer to move around. This resembles the free movements of the head that are important for a realistic view.

At any point we can play the trailer and see how the screen is being perceived from that specific place.

Unfortunately, IE does not support transform-style: preserve-3d which breaks nested 3D elements. So this demo won’t work in the versions that don’t support it.

Chrome Supported

Firefox Supported

Internet Explorer Not supported

Safari Supported

Opera Supported

We hope you enjoy this experiment and find it inspiring!

Check out the version by Sebastian Troć where the real seats are also colored: SebastianTroc/SeatPreview