Challenging hotel-design assumptions a goal of UNLV students

By Thomas Moore

Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Robert Rippee of UNLV’s International Gaming Institute recently asked his students two questions about hotel rooms and hotel room desks.

“I quizzed the class, ‘How many of you have stayed in a hotel room?’ Rippee said.

All the students raised their hands.

“Then I asked, ‘How many have used (the desk)?’

The answer was none.

Rippee used the desk example to explain exactly what he does as director of the Gaming Institute’s Hospitality and eSports Labs in a presentation at the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Wednesday.

Skill-based gaming, eSports and millennials have been the focus of numerous G2E seminars. According to Rippee, former senior vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Sands Corp., he and his students are asking the kind of assumption-challenging questions the industry is trying to wrap its head around.

Questions like, “Why does a hotel room even need a desk?”

“We began to look at it (the guest room), and we challenged the assumptions about design and functionality and space,” Rippee said. “The students said, ‘If there’s no desk, it gives me more space, like to have friends and to socialize.”

“‘Why is this (the desk) here?’ they asked. ‘When I go to a hotel, I sit in bed and use my laptop on my lap.’”

“We went to a hotel and looked at the entertainment system. (Our guide) said, “This is state of the art. And one person said, “I don’t watch TV. I would never turn that on.”

Both the Hospitality and eSports Labs were created after the success of the Gaming Institute’s Center for Gaming Innovation, Rippee said. According to the center’s website, in its first 18 months, the center filed 23 patent applications and commercialized five games.

The Hospitality Lab was launched in the spring, and the eSports Lab was started in August.

Rippee said students for both labs are recruited from colleges throughout UNLV, including architecture, engineering, hospitality and business.

Rippee uses his business contacts to help educate the students about their area of concentration and to judge student projects in a process he said was a lot like the reality television show, “Shark Tank.”

The Hospitality Lab, Rippee said, concentrates on three areas. One is big data from perspective of the hotel. The second was mobility applications that could be used to solve hotel issues such as the long lines at check in. And the third was “the experience of guest room itself.”

The eSports Lab is a little different. Rippee said students don’t work on developing eSport games. Rather, they work on developing business models for integrating eSports into the hospitality environment.

“You can’t walk into say, Caesars, and look at eSports,” Rippee said. “No one has actually deployed it. That’s what the eSports Innovation Lab does. It’s about creating business models and also how to integrate eSports into integrated resorts.”