For many, the most exciting thing about a business trip is the hotel bar. Traveling for work by yourself or with colleagues can be lonely, awkward and not much fun sometimes. A new project from a major hotel chain is hoping to change all of that.
Marriott has partnered with MIT's Mobile Experience Lab to change the social aspect of business travel, as in giving it one. The collaboration has resulted in Six Degrees, a social network in the real world that will help connect business travelers.
Six Degrees includes an app, a digital wall projection and an interactive wooden table. The project uses guests' LinkedIn data to match people based on where they're from, their job titles and interests found in their profiles. The app allows guests to organize activities with others. The wall displays this information and things like how many guests are from a certain city, according to Wired.
But the table is really where the magic happens. RFID nodes are located inside the table, which communicate with guests' mobile devices or a pre-programmed ID card. The table can learn a person's interests or the activities that they've signed up for just by having the smartphone on the table. LED lights in matching colors illuminate the table when two people with similar interests are sitting there at the same time, which solves the problem of how to get people to look up from their screens.
"We wanted to support people's natural inclination to talk, and augment that, not necessarily replace it," project leader Amar Boghani told Wired.
Business travelers of the world will unfortunately have to wait before they can experience these amenities in a Marriott near them. Six Degrees is currently only at the Marriott in Cambridge, Mass., where it's being tested.
Though this project aims to connect business travelers under a general umbrella of social activity, there have been a few apps specifically targeted to connect LinkedIn users on a more romantic level in the past. Hitch.me launched in 2012 to add some legitimacy to online dating by connecting users to information from their matches' LinkedIn profiles. Unfortunately, the website was eventually shut down. The dating app LinkedUp! launched earlier this year and also syncs with users' LinkedIn accounts. And in some cases, people use LinkedIn itself as a way to make romantic connections, although it's usually pretty inappropriate what with it being a social network for professional connections and all.
