June 29, 2007 *
THE STRIP SENSE
Don't Sell Vegas' High-Tech World Short
By STEVE FRIESS
In many ways, it is true, Las Vegas is behind the times. We're
still a bastion of sexism, racism and homophobia, we still have
precious little regard for our environment and we're still governed
by brazen, money-grubbing politicos only slightly more advanced
than their on-the-take Mafia-era counterparts.
But Vegas as a low-tech backwater? Really?
The Las Vegas Review-Journal seems to think so. Last week,
in a front-page piece about a Las Vegas City Council effort
to create a citywide Wi-Fi Internet hot zone, writer Benjamin
Spillman took a cheap shot that bugged me.
His lead: "A place where coinless slot machines are considered
high technology is moving closer to the ranks of cities with
widespread wireless Internet access."
Huh? Now, wait a sec. Is he suggesting implication here that
Vegas is some sort of Luddite state? That the best technology
we're known for is ticket-in/ticket-out slot machines which,
by the way, is actually pretty impressive technology? Really?
In actuality, Vegas is a fascinating proving ground and an
unusual application for a long list of intriguing new technology
that I've been writing about for many years. Here are some of
my favorites:
1. The e-Winebook at Charlie Palmer's Aureole. (See my Newsweek
piece.) It's an Internet tablet that allows diners to search
the ginormous wine selection by price, varietal, region and
food pairing, then email themselves their selections so they
can buy it again when they get home. And after it takes the
sting out of the usually intimidating experience of wading through
the leather-bound brick of most wine lists, you can watch the
wine angels via live, streaming video.
2. The Fountains at Bellagio. It's actually difficult to fathom
the technological coordination required to make those jets produce
the right spurts and arcs at the right moments. That takes a
lot of ambition and a lot of money, which is why nobody else
in the world has topped it in nearly nine years.
3. The Theaters. The stage folds at Love, oscillates at Le
Reve and O, spins at Ka. (See my NY Times piece on the Ka theater.)
The chandelier plummets at Phantom. The backdrop is eye-popping
for Celine/Elton. Amazing stuff, and nobody builds them like
we do for several reasons I outline in this USA Today piece
but most of all because there isn't a business model or the
empty space anywhere else to make such an endeavor make sense.
4. The Fremont Street Experience light show. The numbers tell
the tale here. More than 12.5 million LED lamps. More than 4
million pixels. The capability to show 16.7 million different
colors. The largest outdoor LED display in the world.
5. The Interactive Tabletops of Tabu. There are images on
the table that react to human motion. As predicted in my Wired
piece on it years ago, the technology is spreading. It's now
used to project images near Shark Reef, the MGM Grand Convention
Center and during Ka.
I could go on. At the Rio, there are ATM-like kiosks where
you can pay for your buffet admission. At the New York-New York
there's a self-scan machine to notify the valet attendants that
you'd like your car back. Systems inside the "O" theater and
the Colosseum modify the humidity in heroic ways for the talent
and guest's comforts. And the city's central command for controlling
traffic light timing is Orwellian, but in a good way. Oh, and
the slot machine technology is pretty amazing, too, particularly
the advances made in video graphics and interactivity.
Oddly, Spillman was accidentally quite close to the one area
in which the Vegas casino bosses falls down. Somehow the city
that hosts the Consumer Electronics Show has hotels with unreliable
or nonexistent Wi-Fi in the rooms. That's ridiculous, a scandal.
And, of course, if citywide Wi-Fi actually ever happened,
neither the casino bosses nor Cox Communications both would
ever allow it to cover their hotels. God knows, they need their
extortionist daily Internet fees to cover the loss of that other
ridiculous cash cow of yesteryear, the age-old scam that was
the fees to use the in-room phone. The ubiquity of the cell
phone, of course, put an end to that racquet.
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