Gadgetory

this is not a boat it's a ship it's a cruise ship one of the biggest in the world it's called quantum of the Seas and the five-year project to build it had one explicit goal to create the most advanced most impressive most insanely futuristic cruise ship ever cruises are a battered industry with a reputation for only catering to retirees with gray hair and an unquenchable thirst for shuffleboard and bingo but Royal Caribbean the company behind quantum of the Seas has other ideas it thinks it can build a cruise ship for a new connected generation welcome to the cruise of the future the most important thing about quantum of the Seas the place Royal Caribbean started isn't the Xbox arcade or the Jamie Oliver restaurant it's the Wi-Fi that's what chief information officer Bill Martin's been thinking about for five years the game was over in terms of building the largest so that's not the game anymore what we want is technological advancement we want the most energy-efficient ship on the planet we're building an infrastructure a foundation a base if you will that allows the guests to experience the vacation in a much more seamless way whether that be the cruise planner in advance what does that be getting on the ship right away being online and sharing with friends because that's what you're used to doing getting into a dining restaurant you know when you head don't have a reservation all of these things just add to the experience and make it that much easier one of the things I think about what this boat is is getting new people and that seems like people what people are talking about people who might not otherwise think about cruises is an option for a vacation so is that like what it is one big piece of it but that millennial generation doesn't know what it's like to be disconnected they share everything they want to be online so on board the ship we have three antennas and one is tracking across the sky the closest satellite that is currently overhead and about every hour we switch we do what we do a hop we refer to it as fiber from the sky and because it's a concentrated beam we're getting more than 600 megabits of capacity in our industry we have always had to overcharge for Internet access because we had so little capacity and so much demand that we had to find a way to manage that the man down you have to price because we have to price it out that's exactly right but now we can charge what a hotel charges I was in the North Star two days ago there were three people holding their phone up talking to someone back home facetiming Wow and this is for me this is the coup de Gras of the broadband access I'm particularly curious about the virtual about games which seem like to me one of those things that somebody would bring up in a meeting at the very beginning of the process and somebody would go that'll never work and then you just never even try it we got the idea of an 80 inch high-definition screen tilt it up on its side put it in a false wall put some curtains around it and stitch in it on its way to the cabin the balcony railing position just right with the glass and the floor of the balcony the key to making it work it's about the motion just like a ship's move and if what you're looking at doesn't match the motion you're feeling it doesn't work but you can't do anything else with it because if you do anything else on that screen you lose the illusion for Royal Caribbean to be able to offer a week-long cruise in which you'll never be out of touch is a big deal if Bill Martin did it right passengers are going to have all sorts of new free time on this ship but they're on a ship what are they supposed to do on quantum of the Seas there are hundreds of answers to that question the longest lines on the ship during our cruise were for the North Star a little bulb of a room that gets lifted 300 feet above sea level then casually swings out over the water it's more of an observation deck than a ride but the views are outrageous there's also no other cruise ship in the world that lets you sky dive in a wind tunnel that's what ripcord by iFly lets you do on the fifteenth deck of quantum of the Seas as it's done many times before Royal Caribbean took something that's cool on land and made it insane on a ship so I put on a big blue suit that really made me look very cool put on earplugs and goggles and got into a chute with 75 mile-per-hour winds and incredible ocean views I would have taken a selfie but then I would have crashed into something and probably died this whole ship is beautiful it's new and it's shiny there are restaurants shops a basketball court a big pink bear named Felicia one attraction in particular though had talking and taking selfies it was the Bionic bar bars are obviously important to a cruise but the Bionic bar has a lot more going on than just liquor service it started as a project at MIT with this man Michael Lewis and a team of people who actually weren't thinking about alcohol at all the initial conception of the project wasn't necessarily let's make a bar correct right so the group does work and how emerging technology changed everyday life so the point of doing this was to introduce industrial manufacturing to the masses you basically go to a digital device and create something in the digital world that comes to life in the material world it's more like a 3d printer than like anything to do with the bar so you could have done anything but you picked alcohol cuz everybody likes something basically yep these same kinds of robots are the ones that design cars and factories so how do you go about taking those robots and turning them into something that can like shake and pour your drinks the robots have very refined motions these particular ones have one millimeter degree of accuracy promotion and they're done in all kinds of environments upside down sideways one element of their motion is based on the motions of the events of all day he's one of the world's leading ballet dancers we recorded his motion and that motion has been programmed into the robotic arm it gives them more of a human crew attitude to the motion is the Tom Cruise cocktail of the shake so there's more to this than just the robots oh yes thank you sort of the whole story of the process here so the process begins on a tablet if you scan your RFID like that about it so that first asks for your birth year this is both to verify your age being over 21 and also to authenticate who you are in case someone were to steal your your ID badge he couldn't just order a drink or anything else on the ship and you and there's two options you can choose from a preset menu or do create your own drinks let's choose one we don't have a Cosmo I'm into it so you Add to Cart okay then you order so this sends it into the network the robots retrieve the order tell your waiting time the robots know how to assemble the ingredients for the drink they shake or stir per your request there are therefore conveyer belts and there's a display that shows both where you are in the queue and which drink is being made you tap your RFID to which conveyor you're on and the drink comes out to you what have you learned from being part of this whole process one is that the future really is here is it go more into the 21st century this sort of technology is becoming more and more commonplace things that we saw in the Jetsons decades ago now are commonplace in the real world so you're saying I will have one of these in my living wills a mexican-themed promise dress here's what quantum of the Seas gets really crazy the robot bar isn't even the most futuristic thing about this ship that distinction belongs to 270 a two-story room at the apse of the ship that kind of defies description Royal Caribbean's VP of entertainment is Nick Weir and he's been working on 270 since he started at the company it has well it has everything what's this sort of grand vision for this room so 270 is designed to be the ultimate multi-purpose menu by day it is a living room but inside that we have all this theatricality like a robotic animated entertainment this image right now behind us is made up of 18 images and they're all overlapped and you get one big large shot these 18 projectors need to be controlled by one central brain and that's what the cool Lux does we can also open the whole thing up and look at the view of the Atlantic that's also pretty cool what was the goal with the robots like you started anyway we want to build a robot well I mean the idea actually came from believe it or not the people who make our propellers somewhere in some bar in some town a conversation was had between people who build our ships and ABB and they said we've got this idea for robotics that we can put animation on so that they move you know robot normally goes from A to B as fast as it can what these robots do is they see 30 frames of animation so we use the same program that DreamWorks use Maya and so when a robot moves in a second it actually has 30 30 moves in a second okay and so you get this organic flow is there anything you could like learn from or lean on to get inspiration for this or were you just really kind of inventing it and every bending it at every step so normally you just your task is to do it and in this case you've got to create the science for getting it done first so we had to figure out of the whole thing how do you move a robot in 3d how do you put a payload on it that's a video screen and then on top of the screen you put custom content so the idea is when you move the robot this way you create content that's also moving and that creates the illusion of this fluid motion this theaters closer to NASA than Broadway by using the robotics and the high-definition screen we're going to try and create an experience that's pretty much the same as life yeah or better wow that's that's a that's a big goal why not the holy grail is can we have a room full of people listening and dancing to an orchestra that aren't actually on board and you know that's that's kind of the beginning of a whole new world I've only been on a cruise once before a few years ago it was cold and windy and there really wasn't anything to do except go to the casino and lose a blackjack while drinking overpriced beer quantum of the Seas isn't like that we were on the ship for two full days and hardly even scratched the surface of what there is to do it's like a mall and a five-star hotel all in one except everything's moving a little all the time and the rooms are really small but none of that really matters because you're not going to be spending any time in your room while you're on classmen that sees you are going to be skydiving you