What I will be posting about today may shock
some of you, as it did when I just got a glimpse of the headline. “What if you could check into a hotel, have
your luggage carried to your room and order a coffee — all with help from a
team of robots?”1 That is exactly what’s happening in Japan right now.
“A new
hotel at a theme park in Nagasaki, Japan, hopes to make that dream a reality.
The Henn-na Hotel (whose name means "strange hotel") will be
partially staffed by androids that work as reception attendants, robot waiters,
cleaning staff and a cloakroom attendant”2 This is definitely something that I would want
to check out, but at the same time it seems extremely eerie.
Many of these robots will portray a young
Japanese woman and will be able to “speak Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, make hand gestures, and
pull off the somewhat creepy feat of mimicking eye movements.”3
Since the costs of workers is down a significant amount, this
hotel is able to charge much lower rates than the other hotels in and
surrounding the theme park, averaging at $60 US per night, rather than the
regular $170-255 US. If the success of this hotel meets expectations another
may open up for business in just a year! The one major thought on my mind when
reading this is, will this extraordinary idea of a hotel make its way into
western civilization or is it just a crazy idea that won’t go anywhere.
Considering the drastic drops in room rates, and all the jobs it would affect
it is hard to say whether or not we will see this in Canada.
To conclude this blog post I
will add a video that will provide more information on the
Henn-na Hotel, Thank
you for reading and Stay tuned for more posts about the new technology that
would one day be the norm.
References
1.
World’s First Robot-Staffed Hotel
Room to Open in Japan. (February 5 2015). Story. Retrieved on
February 8 2015, from
http://www.livescience.com/49711-japanese-robot-hotel.html
2.
Ibid
3.
Ibid
Super creepy actually
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