The use of robots in our daily lives isn’t exactly new, and while we have heard of robot bartenders, it seems that Royal Caribbean cruise company is expected to deploy them in full on their newest cruise ship, the Quantum of the Seas. The company’s newest cruise ship will be equipped with a Bionic Bar which is essentially a bar with a robot bartender. Now if you were thinking that you could expect to find a humanoid robot behind the bar, you might be disappointed. Instead the Bionic Bar will feature a couple of robotic arms which will move to grab bottles and make your drinks. To order a drink, the customer would have to input their request on a tablet which will then be relayed to the robot who will then mix the drinks and delivered to the guest.
Cruise ships have had a rough go of it lately, but Royal Caribbean is debuting some remarkable technology on its long-teased ship that it’s hoping can turn things around. It’s a little less “poop ship” and a little more science fiction. It’s called “Quantum of the Seas,” and is a remarkably high-tech vessel. Sure, some of the changes are just keeping up with the hospitality times, like online check-in and RFID luggage tracking. But then you walk aboard the 167,800-ton ship, sit down in the Bionic Bar, place an order on the Windows tablet built specially for the ship, watch a robot bartender mix your drink, and realize you’re somewhere a little different than your average hotel. You can play Xbox Live while you sit in a SeaPod in the SeaPlex (yes, these are all real things), thanks to the ship’s apparently broadband-level internet. And in Two70, the huge showroom on the ship, there are six “Roboscreens” that show performances during every cruise, and on Vistarama you’ll see huge projections of anything you can think of. There’s also a “multidimensional performance spectacle” called Starwater. I don’t know what that is. It all sounds a little like a scene out of Wall-E, the all-technology-everything world we fear and desire simultaneously. It sounds pretty wild.
