I stayed in the W Hotel for this year’s JavaOne conference. It is a very nice hotel with the best location for JavaOne — I can go back to my room after a session, change, and catch the next session in time. The room is tiny for its $400 / night price tag — it can barely hold two people chatting with each other. But hey, this is San Francisco real estate.
What I found most amusing about the room is that it has a small box mounted on the wall facing the bed. At the first glance, it looked like a video camera. Why would a hotel install a video camera to spy on guests? So, I decided to climb up the desk and have a better look. It turns out to be more high tech than I thought!
It is actually an IR / heat sensor capable of detecting people in the room. If it detects no one in the room, it automatically adjusts the A/C to save energy and notifies the housekeeping staff that it is okay to come into the room now. That is pretty neat. I guess each housekeeper would also have a handhold device to query for this information as they go from room to room? That would be excellent use case for a Java end-to-end application.
Now I think of it, maybe such sensors have been installed in many hotels I stayed in the past. But this time I stayed in the tiny W hotel room for week — so I had a better chance to actually notice it. 