Skift Take

Overall a good effort from a pure technology integration point of view, but leaves a lot to be desired from user experience design and emotional quotient perspective.

What will the hotel room of the future look like? It is a hugely valuable question that’s been pondered over and worked on in various commercial and research projects worldwide, and a new one by Instituto Tecnológico Hotelero (ITH) in Madrid, Spain, in collaboration with international design studio SerranoBrothers, has come up with the best possible technology-driven answer we’ve seen so far.

For this new project, to be presented today at the Spanish tourism fair FITUR, these orgs have worked with tech companies such as Microsoft, Toshiba, Bang&Olufsen, PayTouch, Roca, and Guardian Glass, among others, to build up this prototype room. It has also created a basic app, in both Apple and Android environments, to walk through this room, with photos and video and the technologies involved.

Here’s how they describe it:

ITH Room Xperience is a room prototype that..combines the latest technology in a revolutionary space that meets the needs of both guests and hotel management…how technologies, software, apps, gadgets and avant-garde furniture could be integrated in a revolutionary futuristic design able to provide a connection-based convenient and interactive experience.

It integrates all its business dimensions and areas, and is also socially and environmentally responsible and sustainable, as well as hyperefficient and hyperconnected, so clients could be able to make the most of each and any technological resources available.

It defies the conventions associated to classic hotel rooms that we all know, because it puts into context the latest technology, designed to shake up guest experience and reconsider hotel management from connection and customer proximity point of view.

Which is a lot of buzzwords, but what it makes up in tech and digital immersive experiences it falls short in actual real-life user experience design and comes out semi-creepy.

Sure, technology is the driver of the future and indeed likely future of hotel experience as well, but closing off windows and doors and making them open like a giant creepy eyelid through technology isn’t better user experience, it is just entry-level CGI science fiction.

Completely reinventing for the sake of reinventing may probably be its biggest fault, but admirable that this may spark other more nuanced ideas.

10 images from the room prototype, judge for yourself:

And the full video with stills from the room prototype and technologies involved:

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Photo credit: The hotel room of the future will be, what else, tech nirvana. SerranoBrothers / Flickr

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