Royal Caribbean Cruises Innovation Lab & Collaboration Center

The Royal Caribbean Cruises Innovation Lab & Collaboration Center increases the pace of innovation for the company’s New Build department, which designs technologically advanced ships. LEO A DALY’s design incorporates virtual reality and collaborative workplace design into the 20,000-SF facility, which is attached to the company’s PortMiami headquarters – where LEO A DALY also renovated 30,000 SF of office space.

The design of the lab celebrates innovation with a curved building corner to call attention to the three-story virtual reality “cave,” which allows designers to inhabit a full-size representation of the spaces they are designing. Wearing virtual reality headsets, team members are immersed into those spaces through projectors that are positioned above, below and around an all-glass platform.

Because this facility is about pushing the speed of innovation, it came together quickly using design-build and lean methods. Early collaboration between the design and construction teams allowed schematic design through full occupancy to occur in just 10 months.