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Now with the new electronic glass sandwich, he says,
"Marlena maintains her open structure and a view of the galley without
any of the smells and that sort of thing." Infrared-controlled automatic
doors save waitstaff the trouble of having to push down a lever while
holding a serving platter.
At the heart of keeping things simple and streamlined, Struik
sees the Crestron remote control system (comparable to Lantic’s) as a great
development.
"In the past, you had to have twenty different remotes for
video, television, air-conditioning, etc.," he says. "Now you can have one
device per area."
But what happens if control of this single remote is contested?
If, for example, you want to watch this and your teenage son wants to watch
that?
With a click, privacy glass "fogs out"
what owners don’t want seen. (Click images to enlarge)
"I would say the one that gets there first probably gets the
controls," says retirement community developer Charles Mann III, who’s quite
pleased with the Lantic pucks on his Royal Denship. "That’s a good rule of the
sea, I think. The gadgets are pretty much foolproof, and I’m not a
computer-savvy person. I didn’t even have a computer until two years ago,
when I was forced to get one by the younger people who work for me."
Mike Kelsey Jr., president of Palmer Johnson, sees gadgets like
the Lantic puck (and the Lantic touchscreen wall units) as speaking a universal
language. Guests on yachts may know nothing about yachts, but entertainment and
other experiences are something they understand instantly. Great gadgets make
for an instant "wow."
"Guests all gather round and talk about them," says Kelsey. "It
really heightens the experience on board.
"The Lantic puck on our boats is something everyone likes to
hold and play with," continues Kelsey. "The more you play with it, the more you
figure out how many functions it has. It brings everything together. It’s the
kind of thing we dreamed of being able to do as kids, but the technology just
wasn’t there. Should you experience a glitch of any kind as you roam the high
seas, 24/7 Lantic technicians in Denmark can go into your system wirelessly,
analyze it and fix it, as long as it’s a software [issue]. Broken hardware is a
different story.
 Iconic iPods reveal a new generation of
easy-to-use gadgetry. (Click image to enlarge)
"I can recall in my decades of building boats how neat it used
to be just to fit a great big video cassette recorder into a piece of joinery,"
says Kelsey. "You needed a separate remote to turn it on, and another for the
amplifier and so on. Pretty soon you have a drawer full of remotes. And
inevitably someone loses one; or when the battery goes dead [someone] steals one
and puts it in another. And it’s all a nightmare. Now you can control everything
while holding a drink or a baby in your lap."
There’s something cool and elegant about this image of suave dexterity
unleashed by today’s high technology. Naturally, gadgets need to do what they’re
supposed to do in this iPod/Crestron/Lantic/privacy glass epoch in which we
live. But now they do more. The new gadgets are designed to make you feel
like a million bucks, as if you have the world quite literally in the palm of
your hand, and what else is the whole yachting experience meant to be but
that?
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