Smart Hotel Rooms in New York City

hc1379 writes "Back in the 90's, Mark Weiser a Xerox PARC scientist envisioned future computing will weave themselves into the background of our everyday life. People will use computing as natural as they use writing instruments. He called it ubiquitous computing (aka pervasive computing). UbiComp was a good research idea, but did not really find its way into the commercial market, at least not in the life time of Mark Weiser, who died in 1999. One of Harry's blog reports that the Mandarin Oriental in Manhattan has smart hotel rooms that can keep track of guests' preferences and change the room conditions automatically (e.g., adjusting room temperature and lighting conditions based on the guest's preference, and alerting maids when the minibar is running low on soda)."

Comments

Computers are great

[PunkOfLinux]

I try a lot to build computers into whatever I can. Making technology useful for anything and everything, thus simplifying life, is really what technology is all about.

Instead of just making a toaster, why not make a toaster that learns how different people like their toast?

Or, instead of making a set of speakers, why not make a set of speakers that can automatically adjust to prevent distortion, no matter the volume level?

Re:Computers are great

[gkuz]

Instead of just making a toaster, why not make a toaster that learns how different people like their toast?

My toaster has a dial on the front, that adjusts from "lighter" to "darker". It's actually very easy to use, and I don't have to log in before toasting my bagel. It's really pretty well "simplified" already. How much simpler do you propose to make it?

Re:Computers are great

[xs650]

Let me know when the toaster is smart enough to know how I want the toast this time instead of how I had it last time.

Turning a dial is lot simpler than trying to outwit some appliance that thinks it knows what I want.

Re:Computers are great

[Jerk City Troll]

Source: http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference- explained

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. &ldquolWhat do you think this is?”

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”

“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”

“The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”

“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”

“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v.8.3’ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that

Heh heh heh...

[lewp]

Oh, the minibar was never in danger of running low on soda...

Jane, stop this crazy thing!

[Senes]

Would be amusing to see what one good hacker or software glitch could do with a room like that. As if being able to scan people's important info out of a key card wasn't enough.

My preferences, eh?

[imboboage0]

When they figure out that I would prefer not to pay and adjust accordingly, then we're talkin.

Smart hotel

[aktzin]

A good example of advanced computer intelligence in a hotel (not just the rooms) is in the detective/science fiction novel "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-fo rm/102-8961702-9548145

It's set mostly in San Francisco in the 25th century, and there's a "Hendrix hotel" that's actually controlled by a self-aware AI inspired by its famous namesake. There's a very violent scene where some thugs attempt to commit a crime in the lobby. Let's just say the hotel had really good security.

I've seen various things like this done

[grahamsz]

I had a hotel in italy where the room lights were activated by your room key. This allowed them to know exactly when you left your room. One day we took a nap in the middle of the day, wandered round the town for an hour or so and returned to find that the bed had been remade.

The offered otherwise excellent service (Hotel Panorama, Venice btw) but using technology for a few extra touches makes all the difference.

The Mirage in las vegas had a minibar that was monitored by computer in my suite. I'm not sure if they'd have come and restocked it, but it stops you replacing that $4 bottle of aquafina you took with an inferior quality one from safeway.

My point is that these smart features wont make a craptastic hotel better, but they can make a nice one nicer.

Stayed in one in Philly Two years ago

[puto]

I stayed one in Rittenhouse in Philly, well almost three years ago.

They had a console by the bed where you could control lights, tv, temp etc.

The best featue is you could set the temp of the shower and it would turn itself on when it got to the promper temp it would notify you.

It also had movies on demand. So my girlfriend and I decided to watch a video on demand. The movie Barcelona. She had never seen it. I told her about it. I got in the shower after the movie started, or was supposed to start.

I come out of the shower and she is seated on the bed with a funny look. And this is a girl who spent ten years working in Turkey and various other countries. Unshakeable.

The automated system had decided to lock on some weird shemale porn flick that was in a loop.

She figured it was glitched, and it wasn't me.

True story...

I thought the automated room would be romantic.

The next day they fixed it and gave us a free night.

True story. Nothing like shem porn to be a mood killer.

Puto

RFID for Prostitutes

[loserface]

It would be a lot cooler if it could match the room settings to which hooker you have with you that night.