A Night in the Hotel of the Future

Roland Piquepaille writes "Michael S. Lasky was lucky enough to test the amenities of the "Room of the Future", Room 267 of the Hilton Garden Inn in El Segundo, California. Among other things, the room provides a wall-mounted, 42-inch flat-screen HDTV Panasonic plasma television, a biometric room safe, free broadband, accessible via laptop or the TV, or a Panasonic massage chair. Needless to say, Lasky didn't have enough time to test everything during his one-night stay, but was quite pleased. Check this column for a summary and a picture of the "Room of the Future.""

Comments

the future looks grim

[LuxFX]

So how is this the room of the future? This all sounds like stuff that's around already. The only part that's somewhat unusual is the biometric safe -- but when there are already biometric PDAs on the market, it's just not as impressive.

The Hotel Room of the Rich, maybe, but not Future. Sounds like Lasky was desperate to add some hype to a story.

A Hotel Room of the Future should be something that attempts to guess and then mimic how future innovations would tie in with the setting. (mimic being the keyword, because the object here is to show what hasn't been produced yet)

For instance, a room where the fabric-upholstered walls were made of ultra-thin flexible LCD sheets, and displayed a database of exotic settings. (faked for display with a simple projector) And a AI assistant that could order food from various restaurants, book theater tickets, or call a cab. (faked for display with a pre-recorded sequence) And a three-dimensional television set. (faked for display with iMax technology, requiring the use of glasses for demonstration)

Then I would be convinced that I was in a room of the future, or at least a mockup room of the future.

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Coleman Peltier cooler's pretty quiet

[zptdooda]

Maybe they have something similar in the hotel room. It's way quieter than our normal fridge.

My wife bought one of these coolers for camping. No compressor, but it does have a small fan to drive out the warm air.

Frankly I was strangely miffed that I wasn't the first one to bring a Peltier cooler into the house.

If you're into Star Trek, you can get extra kicks from reversing the polarity and turning it from a cooler to a heater. Instead of cooling the contents to 40 degrees below ambient, it warms to 80 degrees above.