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Airplane mood cabins

Swiss automotive design house Rinspeed announced a new initiative to design airplane cabins with light displays on the walls.

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Wayne Cunningham Managing Editor / Roadshow
Wayne Cunningham reviews cars and writes about automotive technology for CNET's Roadshow. Prior to the automotive beat, he covered spyware, Web building technologies, and computer hardware. He began covering technology and the Web in 1994 as an editor of The Net magazine.
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Wayne Cunningham
The Sensosphere shows a starry night on cabin walls.
The Sensosphere shows a starry night on cabin walls. Rinspeed

Swiss automotive design house Rinspeed announced a new initiative to design airplane cabins with light displays on the walls. According to its press release, Rinspeed says it can replace "clinical and plastic-orientated ceiling and side panels" with "soft-focus effect pictures and patterns, which are supported by sound and aromas". Rinspeed calls its cabin design Sensosphere. It relies on a computer-controlled electroluminescent material lining the cabin walls for the displays, and we're not really sure what it relies on for the aromas. But anything has got to smell better than the passenger in the next seat. We've seen Rinspeed's work before with its crazy transparent eXasis concept car at the Geneva auto show. BMW recently announced its own initiative to design airline cabins, so it seems this is a hot new market for carmakers. We've seen similar mood design going into Toyota's iSwing concept.