Its not something that you hear of every day, Technologically advanced. But when my boss came up to me and asked me to work on a design for a hotel in Abu Dhabi, it was something that we wanted to make. Being in construction especially in the Middle east always involves trying to make the biggest, largest, most complex, most interesting structures and landmarks when it comes to facilities.  It is a part of working in the middle east I guess, and the word Dubai itself inspires wow into people. Getting back to the Hotel, the development of the most technologically advanced hotel in the world is something we were attempting, and definitely we had to check out the competition. Competition when it comes to exuberance and abundance comes only from one part of the world, Las Vegas. And it is there, we found our formidable opponent. The Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas to be precise. It is not yet in the list of the most famous hotels, but trust me you will hear it very soon.

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As we are trying to come up with a design in sheer technology to beat that hotel, we just need to look in awe at the Aria Resort and drool at the technology. Through our study we found these amazing features in the hotel that opened on Dec 16 last year. Marketing itself as a high-tech alternative to Vegas’s more traditional resorts, with a data and communication system driven by 283 individual telecom rooms and a broadband antennae network covering 140 million square feet. And while the technology brings many high-tech luxuries to visitors—omnipresent wireless connectivity, 3D monitors and smart touchscreen interfaces—it also crosses into potential Big Brother territory. Here is a close look at some of Aria’s biggest technological advances.

The Autonomous Smart Room

Aria technicians ran primary and redundant fiberoptic networks to each of the hotel’s 4004 guest rooms, allowing for extensive in-room automation. When a guest enters a room, curtains automatically open, music plays, the TV activates and climate controls bring the room to a preset temperature. If a guest leaves, the lights go out, curtains close, the TV and music shut off, and the temperature reverts to a preset, personalized setting. All room features (including the “Do Not Disturb” sign) can be manipulated with a Control 4 touchscreen room-automation remote control, or directly through the room’s HDTV. A forthcoming iPad app will also allow the tablet to double as a room remote.

Since guests register with the Aria’s data system, the hotel can store all room setting information indefinitely. If a guest returns a year later, their room can be prepped with the same lighting, entertainment and climate settings as during their previous stay. What makes it great is the fact that its the only hotel to implement such a system on such a large scale, increasing the efficiency of the rooms as well as maximum comfort and personality to the rooms. But, the real advance is still to come—hotel technicians are working on systems that would allows guests to control their room settings from across town through their cellphones. This could result in energy savings by allowing guests to turn off their a/c-saving energy usage as they could turn off their a/c when they leave—and turn it back on before they return to their rooms. By billing the guest for the Air conditioning and Energy usage along with the room, they are ensuring that the guest takes onus of the energy saving aspect. This is a trend that should and will take off.

Augmented Reality

You read that right, Augmented Reality. The Hotel is taking technologies related to the cell phone to the next level. Once a guest’s smartphone is registered with the Aria, hotel attractions could push personalized notifications to the user. All the guest has to do is hit a button, and the agreement will be akin to a signature. And since the Aria is able to track cellphones while on resort grounds, the hotel will easily be able to send guests special features and offers depending on who they are and where they are standing at any given moment. Are you a known blackjack player? The resort can let you know about empty player chairs at the $25 tables. Like buffets and standing near the dining area? They can send you a digital coupon for $2 off your brunch.

Since the Las Vegas strip makes for a good view and good places to visit are dotted all over the place. The  engineers and technicians may work on a trying to provide a sort of a tourist road map from the windows out trying to make the tourist a virtual map of where they want to go and provide information of all the landmarks that you can see from your window.

Smartphone Key Cards

Over the next two years, biometric smartphones will drive further features at the Aria and other tech-forward hotels. “We want to get to the point where we can encode your cellphone so you can use it as your credit card, you room key and your Player’s Club card,” says John Bollen, CityCenter’s vice president of technology. “Guests would open their door or pay for a product or service with a specially developed app.” According to Bollen, an Aria app should also work at other MGM properties in Vegas.  And since every inch of the Aria is covered by what the hotel calls a “heat-sensitive” Wi-Fi network, phones are less likely to find themselves in dead spots. That heat-sensitive technology reads the density of activity on the network, and adds Wi-Fi muscle to parts of the grid that require more bandwidth.

While using a smartphone as a keycard or credit card certainly sounds appealing, it has obvious security risks, and it could prove difficult for customers to get comfortable with the idea. Hotels like the Aria will have to install multiple levels of encryption and data protection to prevent fraud and privacy violations. Heat Sensitive WiFi networks are not yet common, experimental implementations like these will give engineers and designers the ability to provide amazing coverage to locations that matter, another technological milestone.

Watching What You Eat

All dining facilities feature digital menus on the casino floor, at every gaming station and in the restaurants themselves. The Aria’s data-hub tracks how many people access the menus, what they access, when they access and what they order. The hotel’s food mavens can calculate how many people read the menu compared to how many eat in the restaurant, track what items are selling, and easily adjust menu selections and prices on the fly. So far, hotel statistics indicate patrons who scroll through an entire menu tend to move on to something else. Those who stop halfway, though, often get a table.

In the recent past, it would have taken weeks of record keeping and analysis for chefs and restaurant managers to deduce what their top earners were. Now, the real-time, data-linked menus can immediately read trends from the dinner table and analyze it with a quick and easy cost–benefit table. This could be a problem for guests who enjoy less popular fringe items, which could be pushed off the menu. But this sort of ‘popular-dish-only’ might make your favorite dish available in more restaurants and not restricted to a particular restaurant in a chain.

Who’s Watching You?

Its a casino as well at the end of the day, so security and surveillance is one of the most important feature. Not only are cameras used for trying to find who is cheating at the tables or who is stealing from the guests; advanced algorithms in cameras can detect for suspect behavior, or even identify if a person has had a stroke or just has been drinking too much and creating a nuisance. The Aria’s Honeywell camera surveillance system could eventually be used for more than security monitoring. The cameras can use facial recognition software to tell who’s coming and going, and to home in on VIPs to whisk them to the front of a line or shower them with special treatment.

But there are perks to Big Brother watching you—if you’re a VIP, that is. For example, if a guest has a Player’s Club Card, and his or her face is ID’d (or a smartphone detected), there’ll be no need to stand in line at the club. A concierge will scan for the right faces and phones before escorting those chosen people in ahead of the crowd. When you combine such cameras with the smartphone network, no one—especially frequent guests—will be able to move around the property with anonymity. And for frequent guests, the hotel might know an uncomfortable amount of personal information—from what they eat, to what TV stations they watch.

The Aria Resort and Casino, within MGM’s new City Center complex on the Las Vegas Strip, may be the most technologically advanced hotel ever built. Its mix of gadgets and cutting-edge networks blends centralized convenience with personalized luxury (and even a squeeze of energy-saving sophistication) to offer a glimpse of what all hotels could look like in the future.