You might have wondered what the hotel rooms of the future are going to look like. Well, maybe you haven’t, but after checking out the Future Hotel Showcase, I was quite interested — and a little confused as to why the future is so monochrome.

CNNMoney.com has a interesting video on what a joint research project from Fraunhofer IAO and LAVA — the architecture group behind Abu Dhabi’s new Zero Waste and Zero Emission city Masdar.  Their goal was to find out what people were going to want and to need in the next generation of hotel rooms. This beautiful, sleek, and ultra shiny white room is the result.

There are some pretty interesting ideas in the room, like a bed that rocks you to sleep, custom dynamic lighting, and infrared lights to help repair aging skin (Nope, that’s not a joke).  There also included the ability to control most of the room with voice commands.  This technology has a way to go before it can become a truly dependable control system since speech is so unique, but I suppose by 2020 we might be there.

To me the most interesting system in the room is the sensor-enabled floor.  There are no light switches in the room; instead, when you get up at night and put your feet on the floor the room detects your presence and lights up the area around you.  The floor is completely covered in these sensors which they hope can be used to monitor temperature and heart rate of the occupants.  Honestly, though, I’ll be happy if it just lights up the floor when I dance:

It’s going to be fun to see where the future takes us.  LAVA is a very talented and creative firm, and here they’ve created quite an interesting take on what the future might look like for hotel rooms.  The room is dependent on quite a lot of developments in other product technologies, but 2020 is a long way away, and a lot can happen by then.  I personally can’t wait for these rooms of the future, but that’s probably because I like the color white.