How 900lbs Built a Real-Time Safety Command Center for Royal Caribbean with Photon
Introduction
Modern cruise ship safety operations depend on fast coordination, shared situational awareness, and access to accurate information when incidents occur. For Royal Caribbean Group, printed deck maps and fragmented communication methods no longer matched the complexity of onboard safety workflows across large vessels and distributed response teams.
To address this, 900lbs developed the Safety Command Center Interactive Touch Table: a Unity-based, multi-user touchscreen application deployed on 10 Royal Caribbean and Celebrity ships worldwide. Positioned on the bridge, the system brings real-time deck plans, safety overlays, incident data, annotations, checklists, and remote collaboration tools into one shared operational view.
Photon provides the real-time communication layer that connects the bridge application with tablets and PCs across the ship. This allows safety teams to share drawings, overlays, vantage points, and checklist updates instantly across devices, helping everyone work from the same live information during safety operations.
Challenge
Royal Caribbean sought a way to modernize how safety teams communicated onboard its ships, moving away from printed deck maps and fragmented communication methods to an interactive, real-time visualization system that could centralize information, enhance coordination, and accelerate response to onboard safety incidents.
Solution
The Safety Command Center Interactive Touch Table, deployed on 10 Royal Caribbean and Celebrity ships across the globe, serves as the central hub for onboard safety operations. Positioned on the bridge, the multi-user touchscreen application brings together data from multiple ship systems into a single, interactive view, giving safety officers and response teams real-time visibility into incident response and operational plans through dynamic deck plans and safety overlays.
Designed to enhance situational awareness and collaboration, the platform introduces powerful visualization tools such as drawing and annotation features, incident timers, navigational data, and e-mustering views. Its remote collaboration capabilities allow teams across the ship to communicate seamlessly with the bridge, improving coordination and significantly reducing response times for onboard incidents, ultimately helping to create a safer environment for both crew and guests.
Platform / Devices
The Safety Command Center Interactive Application is developed in Unity and utilizes Photon Realtime to connect various devices, including tablets and other PCs, to the PC on the bridge. By connecting the devices together, users can share the drawings they make on the deck maps in real time, as well as specific vantage points and selected overlays, giving each user access to the same information as it becomes available.
The application also tracks safety checklists, synchronizing changes to the list on every device in real time using Photon as the multi-user framework.
Use of Photon
900lbs utilized Photon to build the underlying communication architecture that allows users to share information in real time. By starting with Photon, 900lbs was able to iterate quickly during design and identify the optimal implementation path.
It also allowed 900lbs to transition from cloud-enabled services to a local solution without sacrificing performance or having to rewrite much of the code. All in all, Photon allowed 900lbs to build, deploy, and maintain a strong foundation for the Safety Command Center application that lives on to this day.
About the Client
Royal Caribbean Group is a global cruise company and one of the world’s largest vacation brands. Headquartered in Miami, it owns and operates several cruise lines, including Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, and Silversea Cruises, with additional joint ventures like TUI Cruises and Hapag-Lloyd Cruises. The company is known for innovation in ship design, guest experiences, and sustainability efforts, serving millions of travelers worldwide each year.
About the Agency / Studio / Partner
900lbs is a specialized, future-focused experience design agency that blends emerging technologies, custom software, and visual storytelling to bring bold ideas to life. The team creates innovative interactive experiences and compelling visual content that connect with audiences in meaningful ways and achieve measurable business results.
Conclusion
The Safety Command Center Interactive Touch Table shows how real-time multiplayer technology can support more than games. In this case, Photon helped 900lbs build a connected, multi-user safety application that improves how shipboard teams coordinate, communicate, and respond.
By using Photon as the underlying multi-user framework, 900lbs was able to iterate quickly during development, connect multiple devices in real time, and move from cloud-enabled services to a local deployment model without a major rewrite. The result is a durable communication architecture that continues to support onboard safety workflows across Royal Caribbean and Celebrity ships.
For safety-critical environments, the value is straightforward: teams need a shared view of what is happening, where it is happening, and what actions are already underway. With Photon, 900lbs created the real-time foundation needed to keep that information synchronized across devices and teams.
Building a real-time, multi-user application in Unity?
Photon helps teams synchronize state, shared views, user input, annotations, checklists, and live collaboration data across connected devices. Explore Photon Fusion for high-performance state synchronization, or visit the Photon Getting Started documentation to choose the right product and architecture for your real-time multiplayer or multi-user application.
