Robotel

“God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.”

What do you get when you cross a robot and a prehistoric dinosaur? A worker at M2 magazine? Close, but no. A Jurassic Park remake directed by Neill Blomkamp (Chappie, District 9)? Even closer! But no. What you do get is the front foyer at the Henn na Hotel in east Tokyo.

The first Henn na Hotel opened in 2015 in Nagasaki and has since grown to landing some pretty big gongs – and a Guiness World Record to boot. The word ‘henn’, translated from Japanese, stands for ‘change’, and this is definitely a big change, alright.

Those green dinosaurs do look like they’ve jumped out Jurassic Park, though…wearing bellboy hats. Controlled by a tablet system that allows customers to communicate with the dinosaurs through four different languages – Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English, the robots use AI technology so they can interact in real time with real people. They have big arms to gesture with and movable limbs to make the dinosaur animated. Quite startling for any visitor!

Whether it be for a bit of fun, or the next thing we’ve got to expect when visiting overseas hotels, the robots are certainly to stay at Henn na. The rooms are manned with mini-robots too. They look like Star Wars drones that guard your room as you sleep and will wake you up in the morning! The future is certainly looking to be driven by machines – especially hotels run by robot dinosaurs.