Vancouver’s 61-story Shangri-La hotel/residential tower boasts a 119-room five-star hotel on its first 15 floors, 300 residential condominiums occupying floors 16 through 61, the renowned Market restaurant and Chi Spa, a specialty foods supermarket, and gallery space for public art. In addition, the property features the absolute state-of-the-art in remote-controlled automation systems for both commercial and residential use.

When it came to the Shangri-La’s control system, intuitive control and ease of use were primary requirements, as users might be guests or residents with little or no technology training who are using the system for the first time. An additional challenge was that the tower is essentially all glass, which allows a great deal of sunlight in the building. This made infrared-based control a poor choice for the system, and meant the property would need to rely on RF-based solutions.

Shangri-La’s control system was installed by Vancouver-based Millson Technologies, inc., who chose RTI solutions for the property based on their reliable RF technology. For the residential component of the Shangri-La, RTI’s T3-V and T2-C universal handheld controllers and RP-6 processor play key roles in delivering these-high performance control systems. These solutions are enabled by RTI’s exclusive two-way communication platform, designed to enable feedback from a wide range of electronic and environmental systems in residential and commercial applications. RTI systems feature cutting-edge programming software and offer tight integration with third-party devices such as the Lutron Homeworks® lighting control system featured in the luxury condominium homes.

The hotel portion of Millson Technologies’ installation includes the Chi Signature Spa and fitness center, the business center, meeting rooms, and a 30-seat private theater decked out in the most advanced A/V and videoconferencing technologies available.  In the business center, an RTI handheld controller is used to operate every component, including the lighting, window coverings, the LifeSize® videoconferencing system, the Sony flat-screen HD displays, and a specialized HD document camera mounted in the boardroom ceiling that enables meeting attendees in remote locations to view high-resolution images of documents anywhere on the table’s surface. The RTI controllers offer a compact, yet powerful alternative to the large, hard-wired touch screens that are typically required for an A/V installation of this complexity.

In addition, RTI’s T2-C controller can be found in dozens of the 300 Shangri-La luxury condo residences. Millson Technologies included the controllers as part of its Residential Technology Options™ program, which gave condo purchasers the ability to pick and choose from several technology options including home cinema, distributed audio, lighting control, motorized window coverings and full Automation systems.

With its control system, Shangri-La offers guests and residents a single, simple-to-operate remote control device that allows control of everything from sophisticated A/V and videoconferencing equipment to home theaters, lighting, and window coverings.  After nearly a year in operation, the Shangri-La conference facility has rapidly gained a reputation among meeting planners as a premier meeting destination in Vancouver. “According to the hotel manager, many people book the business center specifically because they want to access the video conferencing system,” said Richard Millson, president of Millson Technologies. “There is lots of hotel competition in the city, but the simplicity and ease of use of the RTI-based HD system we created for this installation has established Shangri-La as the new benchmark for others to beat.”