The days of barstaff may yet be numbered. Customers having to walk to the bar to order their drinks, pay after each round or ask someone for a taxi number? Forget it.
I've seen the future and the future is "escape pods". What, you may well ask, are "escape pods"? Essentially they are touch screen computers which allow customers to order and pay for their drinks without having to leave the comfort of their seat. It's as simple as that.
But it may not be the complete end of social interaction as we know it. Firstly, customers must initially leave their bank card at the bar and pick up a tag card, which they can then wave in front of their pod to order drinks. And secondly, this is the fun part, the technology allows punters to send messages (ok, flirt) from one table to another. Hours of fun.
I went along for a demonstration of this new technology at the University of Westminster's new student union bar Inter:mission. The bar had yet to officially open, but Rayhan Omar, the student union's vice president of communications already seemed excited by the prospect.
"When most people think of student bars they conjure up the image of people queuing for ages to get cheap pints of lager," he said. "We wanted to make our new bar a bit different and improve the experience for our customers. This system will allow students to skip the queue and order drinks at their table."
Rayhan explained that a recent trial night had raked in a £5,000 bar take. "That's just unheard of," he said. There was also other evidence of the system's success as one screen still had numerous messages that had been sent to another table - some of them unsuitable for a family audience, as you can imagine.
And Rayhan had already noticed customers were broadening their horizons in choosing drinks. "It seems that as people have more time to select their drinks and have a browse at the cocktails on offer they are more experimental," he explained.
So how did such a fiendishly simple idea become reality? As with many ideas it was borne out of personal experience and a certain amount of frustration. Roland Thompson, sales and marketing director of Escapism, the company behind the technology offers a very simple explanation. "It just seemed obvious," he said. "I was fed up with spending most of my Saturday nights standing in a queue at a bar." This frustration reached boiling point around four years ago, but it's only in the last 18 months that the technology has been in development. Escapism has already installed three other systems around the country, but this is the first in a student union.
And the beauty of it is that it can be tailored to suit the needs of individual bars. At a sports bar, for example, punters can watch a football match on their screen or pay-per-view movies can be screened in a chill-out lounge.
One further benefit of the system appears to be the female-friendly aspect. Ian Radley, Escapism's chief executive officer pointed out: "In some venues it can be intimidating for women to queue at the bar where there is pushing and shoving, but this gets round that problem."
Though this Star Trek-esque technology would clearly look out of place in a traditional community boozer, Roland Thompson believes there are some chains that may be interested in adopting the system. As he explained: "It does depend on the type of pub. At the moment we are targeting your more mid to high end bars, but we will be looking to work with chains in the future."
So it may not be quite time for licensees to be laying off their hard-working staff yet. There's still plenty of tasks that computers haven't been programmed to perform - collecting glasses at the end of the night for one thing. But, who knows, in 20 years time we may all have "escaped" from reality…
For more information visit: www.escapismmedia.com