The background
I'm a window geek. I love watching the world scroll past the window when I fly; I look at the land, I look at the clouds, I admire the colours of the sunset, I watch for other planes ... I will almost always carefully select which side window seat I get, just so that I can avoid the "sun" side of the plane. I'm a window geek.
However, especially on ULH flights, I know there is always a mix of time zones aboard, and some people are invariably trying to sleep - and so I don't have my window shade open nearly as much as I'd like to. I'll certainly open the shade during take-off & landing, and sometimes I'll crack it open just to take a quick look mid-flight ... but my preference would be to have it open the entire flight, and out of respect for my fellow passengers I don't do that.
Anyway, last week I flew to/from HKG in J, and over the course of those flights I developed a pretty cool solution that I thought I'd share with the gang here.
The hack
The quick summary is that I setup my phone to display a video of the window view for the entire flight. The phone display let me see what was happening outside, but the blind was closed so no external light ended up flooding the cabin.
The details
The physical setup was key. I had a neck cushion with me, and I jammed that into the space below the window. The phone rested on top of that (in landscape orientation), and then I slid the blind down so that it overlapped the top of the phone by a fraction. This ended up being a pretty decent way of holding the phone in position, while also preventing any excess light from getting in. The phone itself blocked the majority of the width of the window (and so stopping light from coming in where the shade was open), but I put a couple of napkins around the edges and they blocked almost all of the remaining light.
Here's a picture of the setup (click to expand):
I had a USB cable with me, and so for power I plugged the phone into the USB port in the recessed area. To avoid having the screen saver shut the display off, I put the phone into video record mode and basically recorded the entire flight - the original purpose was just to watch the screen itself, I wasn't planning on using the recording ... but the video ended up being better than I expected (see below). To prevent the phone from running out of storage, I set the recording mode to "hyperlapse" (I have an Android phone, but I think iPhones can do the same); this has the benefit of keeping the screen on all the time, but the resulting video file is a very manageable size and didn't fill up the phone.
As I mentioned, the video itself ended up being pretty cool. In hyperlapse mode it records approx 2 mins video per hour, so the 16 hour flight was "only" 30 mins long. I have cut it down to some highlights ... if you'd like to see a 4 min summary of a 16 hour flight, you can see it here:
AC16 - Hong Kong to Toronto - YouTube
Next steps
I'm pretty pleased with how it worked out, but there are always potential improvements. The physical placement and mounting of the phone worked ... but it was not optimal. I'm now thinking about getting some sort of suction cup phone holder, and using that to stick the phone securely in place to the window.
If I also had a semi-rigid cover (perhaps cardboard, or maybe thin plastic), then I could cut a hole in it for the lens, but basically block the entire window using that. That should improve the light seal, and would also allow this hack to work on the 787 (which doesn't have blinds). I will also need to figure out how to mount that with / over / around the phone holder … more experimentation is required here.
The only other change I would make, would be to the recording setting. I discovered after the fact that the hyperlapse speed was set to "auto", which continuously varies the recording speed depending on how much movement the phone observes. This has both pros and cons, but the result is that the final video (which I wasn't originally even planning to keep) has a bit of a stutter ... it suddenly slows down when an interesting cloud appears, for example. I think the video would look more consistent if I forced the hyperlapse mode to a fixed speed (I'm thinking 16x) ... but more experimentation is required.
But overall, this did exactly what I wanted; it gave me a continuous window view, without disturbing the rest of the cabin.