With space travel easily capturing the mass imagination, perhaps it was only time that space found a home here on Earth: Mobillona Space Hotels is a new hyped-up hotel brand that promises a chunk of the space age to guests.
First up to the space-staycation is Mobilona Space Hotel on Barcelona Island, a man-made island off the coast of Barcelona.
The project, which recently announced a €1.5 billion initial investment by Apogee Investors, is out-of-this-world ambitious.
Designed by Barcelona-based architect Erik Morvan, the hotel will be Europe's tallest and will feature a completely networked hotel via the Internet of Things, immersive in-suite video walls featuring space panoramas, a green energy plant, and a on-site wind tunnel delivering a space-specific weightlessness experience.
The Barcelona hotel will feature 2,000 hotel suites and residences, which will have access to a private terraces, an always-open Space Mall, a zero-gravity spa, a covered marina, and several parks, beaches and pools.
CEO Jerome Bottari sounds simultaneously like a visionary and a carnival ringman:
Immersive displays inside Mobilona Space Hotel on Barcelona Island will provide guests with stunning views of some of the most remote galaxies in our universe. Hotel guests will also be able to participate in a Space Training to experience a form of weightlessness in a vertical wind tunnel.
In an email to Tnooz, Bottari continues, discussing the technology behind the glass:
The windows of Mobilona Space Hotels will be transparent glass displays that can be turned on during 'flights' and turned off when guests want to return from their ‘Space Trip’.
In addition to immersive windows, Mobilona hotels and suites will be equipped with superbly designed surface displays to provide guests with the best views from any location or angle.
Mobilona combines visual experiences with the Internet of Things to appeal to all five senses. Guests can see the world around them, hear sounds from everywhere, smell their favorite scents, touch objects they enjoy and taste what they desire. In Mobilona there are no limits to what guests can experience!
Bottari also points to Mobilona's "immersive technology center" that is focused exclusively on creating these experiences.
Mobilona operates an Immersive Technology Center in Bangalore, India that develops immersive experiences for its hotels. Mobilona also plans to open additional centers in Barcelona, Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
The centers work with film studios, game creators and app developers who want to offer immersive content in Mobilona Space Hotels, distribute it in the Mobilona App Space and license it to residential and commercial real estate developers and hotel operators around the world.
Mobilona Immersive Technology Centers are responsible for developing the immersive technology that is necessary to simultaneously control a large number of synchronized wall-size displays to offer realistic views of motion pictures in all directions.
Apogee will manage this financing to ensure that all payments are protected via major financial institutions with hotel suites and residences range from €495,000 to €2.6 million and penthouses from €3.9 to €20 million. Nightly rates for hotel suites will range from €300 to over €1,500.
The website reads a bit like the man who sells the moon:
Barcelona Island will be an out of this world experience for all guests of ‘Mobilona Space Hotel’ who wish they could travel to distant galaxies. The man-made island off the coast of Barcelona will be built by a multinational consortium...Mobilona is committed to improving the climate by operating Barcelona Island with zero carbon emissions and by producing green energy for the people of Barcelona.
And yes, there is a section on Mobilona's website headlined "MOBILONA RESPONDS TO EXTRATERRESTRIAL SIGNALS." Indeed, there is a Space Ambassador program which "plans to respond to radio-emissions from other planets by sending a visual message into space. Apply now to represent the human race!"
The Space Hotel, which plans the construction of Space Hotels in Los Angeles and Hong Kong in addition to another immersive hotel brand, is so out there that it might just convince enough people to be a viable project!