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A year ago at the FITUR hotel conference in Spain, delegates were shown some of the early work by a design studio to showcase the hotel room of the future.
ITH Room Xperience is a project developed in conjunction with Spanish company SerranoBrothers to try and take the hotel experience to the next level, at least in terms of how guests interact with it and integrate their own technology into its systems.
The prototype, supported by the likes of Microsoft, Toshiba, Bang & Olufsen, PayTouch, is full of apps, gadgets, high-tech furniture and more.
Twelve months on and delegates this year can try it out.
The entire system works from an application, so guests can launch and interact with the various functions via their mobile or tablet devices.
A large screen behind the main bed can feature a number of services, ranging from the interactive tools within the application to playing music and, err, "ambient" videos (such as sleep or relaxation-led modes).
Placed around the hotel room are various other screens, mounted on micro-thin plastic and beaming in content from elsewhere - such as a 3D map of the local area...
Or directions for pulic transport...
Another screen taps into a guest's preferred web services (such as news or entertainment sites) or social networks, such as Twitter...
Other tools are more functional for the room itself, showing how much certain tools have been used (guests can run the temperature, for example, from the app).
And a case of where hotel revenue managers might be a bit more eager to work with their geeky colleagues in the IT department is by throwing in offers to other services around a property...
Of course, no blue-sky thinking hotel concept would be complete without the (arguably rather pointless) augmented reality function, in this example allowing a guest to look at the bed-side telephone from their iPad's on-board camera and use the device's own screen to dial a number.
Such nifty pieces of hardware (and their associated software) as these are obviously prototypes and much will depend on the cost of manufacture, implementation and, simply, if a hotel feels the need to head down such a hi-tech route.
As an aside, further inside this hotel room of the future was a rather fancy looking bath, developed by a company called Roca and featuring all sorts of weird and wonderful colours, moods and sprays :)
For the record, delegates were not able to take a dip.
Here's the slightly more polished version f the Serrano technology, via a YouTube clip:
NB: Disclosure – Flights and accommodation for the author’s participation on a panel at the event was supported by FITUR.