02/09/2003

By ROBERT W. BONE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

ABOARD THE CELEBRITY SUMMIT – Perhaps no cruise ship currently on the seas has more examples of passenger high-tech interactivity than the Summit, a supermodern vessel in the Celebrity Cruise Lines fleet.

For the first time in nearly two decades of cruising, I have been able to take my own laptop computer into my cabin and communicate by satellite with the world at large.

This is Celebrity's own Connect@Sea program. Unlike the usual ships' cyber cafés, this setup also allows a passenger to send and receive photographs and other attached files. It didn't always work perfectly, but we paid $100 for this service on the two-week cruise and still found it well worth the money.

One of the first things we did was to send pictures of mom and dad having fun at the pool to our land-locked relatives, and we received a couple of new photos in return.

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And, as an admitted geek, I also created and uploaded almost nightly a special Web site chronicling the progress of the Summit on this Panama Canal cruise. (This site can still be seen at http://robertbone.com/celebrity.)

On the Summit, even the cabin TV is interactive. In addition to the usual run of satellite CNN, some free taped movies, and slide lectures from the shore excursion office, there's a choice of about 40 late-run movies, available for $8.95 a pop – a quarter of them designated for "Mature Audiences." Parents can push buttons on the remote to create a special "lock-out" code to keep the kids from tuning in to the flesh flicks.

Each cabin TV is also connected to a master computer. By pushing buttons on the remote, the passenger is able to book shore excursions, order meals by room service, and – believe it or not – play blackjack, poker or a virtual slot machine. All house minimums are a modest 25 cents a bet. As far as it's known to Huang-Fu Chun, the ship's interactive-television manager, it's the world's first instance of TV gambling – well, aboard a cruise ship, anyway.

There is, of course, a conventional casino on another deck for those whose gaming tastes run more to the traditional.

And if you really want to know how much money you're spending on the cruise – whether gambling, buying drinks, or other special charges – you can find that confidential information on your own TV screen, too.

Outside the cabin, considerable high-tech interactive activities on the Summit include a traditional Internet room, with PCs available at 50 cents a minute, for those who didn't opt for the above-named Connect@Sea program.

(Like those on other ships, no attachments, CD-ROMs or floppy disks are allowed, however.) For those into video games, a small room is tucked away in a corner. No quarters are needed – just push your electronic card/room key into the slot and build your balance due while you shoot down video bad guys.

A music room called Notes provides a dramatic interactive service for passengers who make their way to its two-deck precincts. Borrow a pair of stereo earphones from the guest relations office, and plug in to one of the special computer monitors in order to choose from about 30,000 musical selections.

Children also can reap the benefits of interactive high-tech on the Summit. There's a special youngsters' TV studio that's so good that the kids compete with the cruise staff for air time. It's in a colorful section on Deck 11, called the Fun Factory.

And there also, among all the toys and boxes of Clue and Monopoly, is a terrific line of good ol' Sony Play Stations, available for all cyberkids younger than 18.

Cool, dude. It's almost like being at home.

But one instant of shipboard interaction recently took a passenger by surprise. One woman reported that she was alone in one of the Summit's dramatic, glass-walled elevators. She was struggling a bit while having difficulty adjusting an item of clothing, when she was startled by a voice which boomed from the ceiling: "Are you all right?"

The woman thanked the voice and added that she was not in distress. Recounting the incident later, she said she was certain she had appeared on a security computer screen somewhere, offering yet another example of an interactive connection between ship and passenger.