Don’t Sell Vegas’ High-Tech World Short
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 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 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.
Steve Friess is a Vegas-based writer who contributes regularly to Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times, Vegas and many others. Contact him at Steve[at]SteveFriess.com