 This is not a boat. It's a ship. It's a cruise ship, one of the biggest in the world. It's called Quantum of the Seas, and the five-year project to build it had one explicit goal — to create the most advanced, most impressive, most insanely futuristic cruise ship ever. Cruises are a battered industry with a reputation for only catering to retirees with gray hair and an unquenchable thirst for shuffleboard and bingo. But Royal Caribbean, the company behind Quantum of the Seas, has other ideas. It thinks it can build a cruise ship for a new, connected generation. Welcome to the cruise of the future. The most important thing about Quantum of the Seas, the place Royal Caribbean started, isn't the Xbox arcade or the Jamie Oliver restaurant. It's the Wi-Fi. That's what Chief Information Officer Bill Martin's been thinking about for five years. The game was over in terms of building the largest. So that's not the game anymore. What we want is technological advancement. We want the most energy-efficient ship on the planet. We're building an infrastructure, a foundation, a base, if you will, that allows the guests to experience the vacation in a much more seamless way. Whether that be the cruise plan or in advance, whether that be getting on the ship right away, being online and sharing with friends because that's what you're used to doing, getting into a dining restaurant when you don't have a reservation. All of these things just add to the experience and make it that much easier. One of the things I think about with this boat is getting new people. That seems like what people are talking about, people who might not otherwise think about cruises as an option for a vacation. I assume that's one big piece of it. That millennial generation doesn't know what it's like to be disconnected. They share everything. They want to be online. On board the ship, we have three antennas. One is tracking across the sky, the closest satellite that is currently overhead. About every hour, we switch. We do a hop. We refer to it as fiber from the sky. Because it's a concentrated beam, we're getting more than 600 megabits of capacity. In our industry, we have always had to overcharge for internet access because we had so little capacity and so much demand that we had to find a way to manage that demand down. You have to price people out. We have to price it out. That's exactly right. But now we can charge what a hotel charges. I was in the North Star two days ago. There were three people holding their phone up, talking to someone back home, FaceTiming. And this is, for me, this is the coup de grace of the broadband access. I'm particularly curious about the virtual balconies, which seem like, to me, one of those things that somebody would bring up in a meeting at the very beginning of the process and somebody would go, that'll never work, and then you just never even try it. We got the idea of an 80-inch high-definition screen, tilt it up on its side, put it in a false wall, put some curtains around it, and stitch in it on its way to the cabin, the balcony railing position just right with the glass and the floor of the balcony. The key to making it work, it's about the motion. Oh, interesting. Because ships move. And if what you're looking at doesn't match the motion you're feeling, it doesn't work. But you can't do anything else with it. Because if you do anything else on that screen, you lose the illusion. For Royal Caribbean to be able to offer a week-long cruise in which you'll never be out of touch is a big deal. If Bill Martin did it right, passengers are going to have all sorts of new free time on this ship. But they're on a ship. What are they supposed to do? On Quantum of the Seas, there are hundreds of answers to that question. The longest lines on the ship during our cruise were for the North Star, a little bulb of a room that gets lifted 300 feet above sea level, then casually swings out over the water. It's more of an observation deck than a ride, but the views are outrageous. There's also no other cruise ship in the world that lets you skydive in a wind tunnel. That's what Ripcord by iFly lets you do on the 15th deck of Quantum of the Seas. As it's done many times before, Royal Caribbean took something that's cool on land and made it insane on a ship. So I put on a big blue suit that really made me look very cool, put on earplugs and goggles, and got into a shoot with 75 mph winds and incredible ocean views. I would have taken a selfie, but then I would have crashed into something and probably died. This whole ship is beautiful. It's new and it's shiny. There are restaurants, shops, a basketball court, a big pink bear named Felicia. One attraction in particular, though, had everyone talking and taking selfies. It was the Bionic Bar. Bars are obviously important to a cruise, but the Bionic Bar has a lot more going on than just liquor service. It started as a project at MIT with this man, Michael Lewis, and a team of people who actually weren't thinking about alcohol at all. The initial conception of the project wasn't necessarily let's make a bar, correct? So the group does work in how emerging technologies change everyday life. So the point of doing this was to introduce industrial manufacturing to the masses. You basically go to a digital device and create something in the digital world that comes to life in the material world. It's more like a 3D printer than like anything to do with a bar. So you could have done anything, but you picked alcohol because everybody likes alcohol. Basically it, yep. These same kinds of robots are the ones that design cars and factories. So how do you go about taking those robots and turning them into something that can shake and pour you drinks? The robots have very refined motions. These particular ones have one millimeter degree of accuracy for motion. And they're done in all kinds of environments, upside down, sideways. One element of their motion is based on the motions of Roberto Bolle. He's one of the world's leading ballet dancers. We recorded his motion, and that motion has been programmed into the robotic arms. It gives them more of a human fluidity to the motion. There's a Tom Cruise cocktail to the shake. So there's more to this than just the robots. Walk me through sort of the whole story of the process here. So the process begins on a tablet. If you scan your RFID, would you like to do that? Yeah, I'll do it. So it first asks for your birth year. This is both to verify your age, being over 21, and also to authenticate who you are in case someone were to steal your ID badge. You couldn't just order a drink or anything else on the ship as you. There's two options. You can choose from a preset menu or create your own drink. Let's choose one. We're going to have a Cosmo. I'm into it. So you add to cart, then you order. So this sends it into the network. The robots retrieve the order, tell you your waiting time. The robots know how to assemble the ingredients for the drink. They shake or stir per your request. There are four conveyor belts, and there's a display that shows both where you are in the queue and which drink is being made. You tap your RFID to which conveyor you're on, and the drink comes out to you. What have you learned from being part of this whole process? One is that the future really is here. As we go more into the 21st century, this sort of technology is becoming more and more commonplace. Things that we saw in the Jetsons decades ago now are commonplace in the real world. So you're saying I will have one of these in my living room someday. You will. It's a campaign promise. Yes. So I'd like to hear. Here's where Quantum of the Seas gets really crazy. The robot bar isn't even the most futuristic thing about this ship. That distinction belongs to 270, a two-story room at the aft of the ship that kind of defies description. Royal Caribbean's VP of Entertainment is Nick Weir, and he's been working on 270 since he started at the company. It has, well, it has everything. What's the sort of grand vision for this room? So 270 is designed to be the ultimate multi-purpose menu. By day, it is a living room, but inside that we have all this theatricality, like robotic animated entertainment. This image right now behind us is made up of 18 images, and they're all overlapped, and you get one big larger shot. These 18 projectors need to be controlled by one central brain, and that's what the Coolux does. We can also open the whole thing up and look at the view of the Atlantic. That's also pretty cool. What was the goal with the robots? Like you started, and you're like, we want to build a robot thing. Well, I mean, the idea actually came from, believe it or not, the people who make our propellers. Somewhere in some bar in some town, a conversation was had between people who build our ships and ABB, and they said, we've got this idea for robotics that we can put animation on so that they move. You know, a robot normally goes from A to B as fast as it can. What these robots do is they see 30 frames of animation. So we use the same program that DreamWorks use, Maya, and so when a robot moves in a second, it actually has 30 moves in a second. And so you get this organic flow. Is there anything you could learn from or lean on to get inspiration for this, or were you just really kind of inventing it at every step? Inventing it at every step. So normally, your task is to do it, and in this case, you've got to create the science for getting it done first. So we had to figure out the whole thing. How do you move a robot in 3D? How do you put a payload on it that's a video screen? And then on top of the screen, you put custom content. So the idea is when you move the robot this way, you create content that's also moving, and that creates the illusion of this fluid motion. This theater's closer to NASA than Broadway. By using the robotics and the high definition screen, we're going to try and create an experience that's pretty much the same as live. Or better. Wow. That's a big goal. Why not? The holy grail is can we have a room full of people listening and dancing to an orchestra that aren't actually on board. And that's kind of the beginning of a whole new world. I've only been on a cruise once before, a few years ago. It was cold and windy, and there really wasn't anything to do except go to the casino and lose at blackjack while drinking overpriced beer. Quantum of the Seas isn't like that. We were on the ship for two full days and hardly even scratched the surface of what there is to do. It's like a mall and a five-star hotel all in one, except everything's moving a little all the time and the rooms are really small. But none of that really matters because you're not going to be spending any time in your room while you're on Quantum of the Seas. You are going to be skydiving.