Mixed Reality = The Future of Hotel Rooms

In my Opening Keynote at the Hotel Technology Conference 2016 Singapore, a starting message was that the future of the hotel industry lies in the evolution of the experience. And where more does the hotel experience play out, than in the hotel room? And the hotel room, is going to be transformed, by the advent, of Mixed Reality. Mixed Reality (MR), is what you get, when you blend Actual Reality, with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).

The MR Experience

You walk into your hotel room, through the door and are immediately greeted by a holographic Personal Assistant whom you can talk to. With the help of this holographic Personal Assistant, you can customize the appearance, the view and the ambiance of the room. So if you want to look up to a ceiling and see a clear open blue sky with a few soft white clouds passing across, that is what you get, with a tropical waterfall flowing to the back of your bed, which appears to be floating over a rapid stream. Perhaps, otherwise you want to look out of your window in Paris, to see the Taj Mahal as if you were looking out of a building in Agra?

Need help visualizing? Check out the following video which is a slight variation of what I describe above, just for illustration:

Perhaps you need some wild life to run around your room to entertain your kids? You may want to check out the next video to see how that works:

You can have live dancers or clowns or fire-eaters performing all around you, just that, they won't actually be there. They'd be virtual or holographic projections.

And the experience will not just be limited to sights and sounds for pleasure, but say you are abroad on business and have not been able to bring over your computer, your in-room Personal Assistant can access your email or web-based folder in the cloud, download your documents or presentations, and help you alter or refine them as you instruct, verbally, screened on the wall in front of you, to view. So basically, your room even does work for you, including typing and sending email correspondences on your account; without saving, leaking or compromising your passwords off course.

Notice something about the room experience described so far? Yes! No hands! And if you think it may prove too taxing on your voice box to go on instructing the room all the time with your voice, using Neurotech (the same technology that enables Neuromarketing), the room can read your mood, emotions and thought patterns, to customize and adjust itself, accordingly, to generic presets, to best try and please you, down to the brightness of the room.

The Technology

Besides VR, AR and therefore MR, what we are off course talking about here is holographics, projectors, sensors of all sorts, IoT, data analytics, AI applications, display panels and also multi-dimensional technology.

Depending on what you think of what is being described here, the good news or bad news is, that the technological feasibility is already here. It is possible to build a hotel room as described herein, just that nobody has quite really done it yet. Somebody was the first to start a robot run hotel though. So the question is, who is going to invest in the technology to avail the first MR Hotel Rooms to their guests?

What is in it for the Hoteliers?

With Dynamic Packaging, Sharing Economy Models and changing mindsets of tourists in tandem with the generational change, consider the idea, of competing on a new frontier; who makes the in-room experience cooler? Contemplate it enough, and you figure it comes down to creativity, because we have arrived at a threshold, where what the mind can conceive, the technology can deliver. And now imagine if you are the first in the world, or in your geographical market, to offer something like this? You may turn your rooms, into tourist attractions in themselves, if you are able to get creative and novel enough, with the technology available.

Now, if you are a hotelier breezing through this, and you buy into this idea, don't forget to invite this Futurist in to review the first MR Hotel Room, you create on your property.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting and Keynote Topics include Marketing, Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking and Organisational Future Proofing. He was the Opening Keynote Speaker at both the Hotel Management Summit Singapore 2015 and the Hotel Technology Conference 2016 Singapore.

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