Bahamas Hotel Suite Comes With Own Robot

Ursula understands you.

Ursula knows your favorite drink, your favorite video.

But Ursula is made of steel. And aluminum, fiberglass, polymer resin, urethane, computer chips and fiber optic strands. And she runs on two rechargeable batteries.

Ursula is the $125,000 robot in the Galactic Fantasy suite in the recently opened second phase of Carnival's Crystal Palace Resort and Casino at Cable Beach, Nassau, in the Bahamas. The new section adds four hotel towers, five restaurants and a spa to a hotel, eight restaurants and a casino that opened in 1988.

In the $1.36-million,six-room Galactic Fantasy suite, the walls are dazzling white and silver and glow with tiny, lights running up and down the pillars.

Twenty-foot-tall windows look down onto the ocean, up into the sky. At night, the ceiling blends into the sky with a painted version of a many-ringed Saturn and stars with 4,000 points of fiber-optic lights.

Sensors in the walls detect the heat of your body and electronically summon Ursula. The robot glides forward on a rolling platform to greet you.

``Welcome, Mr. Tasker,'' she says. Or she'll call you ``Fred,'' depending on the preference you stated in the pre-check-in questionnaire.

The robot knows you're someone special, or you wouldn't be visiting the suite, which costs $25,000 a night.

``We don't expect to rent that suite every night,'' says resort president Richard Cook. ``But there are people willing to pay that kind of money.''

Casino high-rollers might even get it free. ``They would be extremely aggressive gamblers, well into the mid-six-figure range.''

Ursula serves guests primarily by showing them how to operate the room, which is so filled with 21st-century gadgets that you'd never understand it otherwise on a single night's stay.

The robot invites you to sit on the mammoth round, rotating white sofa, and shows you the control panel in its arm.

Press one button, and the eight-by-eight-foot wall screen glows with ever-changing electronic art, part of $120,000 worth of special lighting effects.

Press another button and the $60,000 audio-visual system produces your favorite video, TV show, tape or CD. Press yet another and the sofa turns, the $40,000 automatic vertical blinds close on the windows, the better to show off the pulsing electric plasma sculptures. And then there's an electronic thunderstorm available in the master bedroom.

The room is the work of a Miami design and computer team hired by Carnival chairman Ted Arison and given carte blanche to create a ``suite unrivaled in the world.''

Joe Farcus of Miami, architect for the whole resort/casino complex, admits he took chances with the hotel design and its colors.

``I picked the colors of the Bahamas - the way the people paint their houses, the flowers, some of the things you see in sunsets.''

Outside, the buildings are hot pink, salmon pink and bluish purple with back-lit awnings that run the spectrum of colors.

Inside, the rugs and walls are all those colors plus red and yellow and blue and black and orange and raspberry, in patterns that throw circles, squares, stars, trapezoids and dashes against each other so violently you can close your eyes and hear them hit.

Some of the neighbors hate it. Rival hotelier Merv Griffin, of Paradise Island Resort and Casino a few miles away, derisively dubbed it the ``rainbow inn.''

Back in the suite, Ursula has her say: ``I am your personal star maiden. If there is any, repeat any, service you require, please summon me . . . ''

Thank you, Ursula. The thunderstorm, please.

The robot leads the way to the master bedroom and turns: ``Please mount the sleeping pedestal and recline on the bed.''

The fiber-optic swirl on her forehead pulses. Room lights dim. Speakers switch on. A screen slides into place.

Far away, a wind blows, softly at first. Clouds begin to gather on the screen. The room grows misty. Then the wind rises. The clouds become dark, even angry. The storm bursts around you in a driving frenzy of thunder and lightning.

Oh, Ursula.