The Beatles Revolution Bar - Las Vegas review

The Las Vegas bar goes high tech with its interactive coffee tables

10 January 2007 16:19 GMT / By Stuart Miles

When Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" in 1961 he probably had the Revolution Bar which opened 2 weeks ago in the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas in mind.

Inspired by the spirit of The Beatles and created by Cirque du Soleil, The Beatles REVOLUTION LOUNGE is exciting to gadget lovers not because it’s The Beatles, but because of its coffee tables.

No we haven't gone mad, but when you gather eight UK technology journalists covering CES 2007 around a table in a bar with the promise of free booze (courtesy of Hi-Fi makers Denon) you don't expect them to spend the next 3 hours doing nothing else but playing with the table.

Why? Because it was technology so magical it was a wonder to be seen.

The premise was simple. Psychedelic patterns ranging from flowers to love hearts to rainbows would appear on the table whenever you touched it like an interactive Etch-A-Sketch. Once drawn, and all the patterns moved and swayed - some even had moving jelly fish, you were given the choice of deleting the image or saving it to another part of the table.

Every so often a master of ceremonies would appear and view our images (he had magic rings on his fingers) and then ones that he liked where somehow fired on to a wall for all to see.

A bottle of Grey Goose later and we were all so amazed that we still aren't sure how it works although both Philips and HP have demoed similar devices in the past as concepts.

Verdict

We don't get wowed too often here at Pocket-lint, we weren't part of the standing ovation at the keynote at MacWorld for the launch at the iPhone - we were too busy bringing you the news, but this has to be the coolest thing we've seen at the CES 2007 so far, and no it wasn't the Vodka talking.

If you are in Vegas this is definitely one to check out, but make sure you've got ID, the bouncers even carded the over 50s in our group.

Check out the video of the table in action. Apologies for the quality of the video, but the lighting was really dark in the bar (understandably).

Score

Review Recap

Made by: Denon
Price as reviewed: £200 bar bill
The good: The interactivity, the colours, the concept
The bad: It was quite hard to draw anything that wasn't psychedelic, regardless of age you'll need ID
Quick verdict: Eight impressed journalists and 3 hours of playing says it all
Score
Winner