How projection mapping allows guests to customize hotel room décor

Hotel rooms without windows – either because they are interior rooms or they are located under ground level – are not uncommon in some parts of the world, particularly in crowded cities where available land is limited.

There are 40 such rooms at Nordic Choice’s Hobo Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden and more windowless rooms at their other properties in that region.

The company’s director of future business, Christian Lundén, is leading a unique initiative to use projection mapping to provide visual interest and décor to walls and ceilings of these otherwise sparse spaces. The project is called Embed.

“It can be a nice sleeping room if you like dark and quiet, but maybe not that fun and that’s what we would like to change,” Lundén says.

“By having 3D video projected to the walls, it feels bigger. We like guests to ask for these rooms and brag about it instead of maybe be booked last.” 

Nordic Choice, which operates 195 properties with 40,000 rooms in Scandinavia and the Baltics, is demonstrating the technology in one room at the Hobo Hotel. Lundén says it will be added to more rooms and other properties soon.

“We’re working with digital artists from Russia and Spain to project art on walls and ceilings, and we are talking to retailers, music companies, museums, operas and so on where we can see a totally different kind of experience… that you could be in a concert or at a football game or on a boat on a lake. And we are adding music to it, so it will be a full experience,” he says.

Guests use a smartphone app to select the scene for their room.

Nordic Choice is working on Embed with design agency Barkas and researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology who are analyzing how people react to this immersive video experience.