Touchless Elevator Concept

5 min readJul 10, 2020

By Tanay Singhal and Mahika Phutane

Source code: https://github.com/TanaySinghal/Touchless-Elevator.

Elevator buttons (in hospitals) showed a higher prevalence of colonization by bacteria (61 per cent) than toilet surfaces (41 per cent), Donald Redelmeier, director of clinical epidemiology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and his co-authors found. — CBC News

Elevators are a major source of germs and contamination, especially during covid-19, yet they are largely unrecognized.

We present a concept for a touchless elevator with mid-air touch feedback that is accessible, intuitive, and fun. Informed by cutting-edge human-computer interaction (HCI) research, our concept is designed accessibility-first: it features contactless tactile braille (as well as audio feedback) for the visually impaired, intuitive gestures for opening/closing doors, and a lively button magnification on hover for improved accuracy. We hope to drive the conversation on revolutionizing today’s physical interfaces with accessible virtual tactile interfaces.

Why Elevators?

Notice the fingerprints and dirt smothered on elevators (see: https://unsplash.com/photos/YXZM_NSGf90)

We often ignore elevators, but they are one of the biggest sources of bacterial contamination, even in a world without COVID-19. Kandel et al. (2014) show that elevator buttons present a major unrecognized source of bacterial colonization in hospitals. Al-Ghamdi et al. (2011) collected swabs from computer keyboards, mice, elevator buttons, and shopping carts to test for bacterial growth. They found that elevator buttons produced the highest rate of bacterial contamination (97%)! There is even evidence that hospital elevator buttons show more germs than toilet stall surfaces.

Elevators are essential to anyone who lives in an apartment or has accessibility requirements. On average, a single elevator in the USA carries an average of 20,000 people per year. Together, all elevators combined make more than 18 billion passenger trips! (Source)

Our Design

This elevator relies on UltraLeap’s haptic devices, which produce mid-air touch sensations via ultrasonic transducers that focus a pressure on your hand. With this technology, you can feel three-dimensional shapes in mid-air without actually touching anything. For full details on the technology, see Carter et al. (2013) and Kappus et al. (2018).

Accessibility-First: Mid-Air Tactile Braille

When my hand is near a button, it produces braille to indicate which floor I am about to press.

Existing “touchless” elevator concepts include foot pedals, toothpicks, or lighters to burn the buttons before you touch them, but these designs exclude those with visual impairments or those in wheelchairs.

We built this concept with accessibility in mind: when your hand is near a button, you will feel the number it represents as a braille character, as well as audio feedback indicating which floor you are about to press. The braille dots are drawn as single points, one-by-one. We based this technique on research by Paneva et al. (2020), who found that rendering braille dots one-by-one was easier to recognize (94% accuracy) than rendering all dots at once. The paper also describes the exact length of time that each dot should appear, the temporal length of pauses between dots, and the distances between dots. We used their parameters to inform our design.

Magnification on Hover

Buttons magnify when my hand is near them (this GIF is sped-up).

We based our interaction off the Dock on a Mac, which magnifies as you hover over an item. It serves three purposes: 1) to assist partially sighted people, 2) to improve accuracy, and 3) to improve the aesthetics of the interaction. The paper by McGuffin et al. (2005) shows that when trying to select a target, users benefit if the target expands. This feature is especially helpful in a scenario with 15+ floors — our approach would easily scale to that many buttons while still remaining accessible.

Tactile Feedback on Button Press

When you press an elevator button, you will feel mid-air touch sensations to provide feedback that you pressed it. The transparent white cylinder over the button visualizes what I feel on my hand.

Re-Inventing Interactions

A fun & intuitive close-door interaction.

Virtual interfaces are flexible and programmable, allowing us to rethink many of our physical interactions. Have you ever pressed the close button by accident when you meant to open the door for someone? We present a more intuitive gesture-based interaction for controlling elevator doors.

What’s Next?

We have all seen how iPhone’s flexible “soft” keyboard forever obviated the Blackberry keyboard. The iPhone’s keyboard could disappear when you don’t want it, appear when you do, turn into an emoji keyboard when you need it. It is a keyboard that adapts to your need.

Our design intends to leave you with even more questions than you came here with. Should elevator buttons automatically resize and move depending on an individual’s height and needs? Must elevator controls remain in a corner on the wall — could they instead move to passengers? Could virtual elevator controls encourage or even enforce social distancing?

But this is not just about elevators.

Citations

Al-Ghamdi, A. K., Ashshi, S. A. A., Faidah, H., Shukri, H., & Jiman-Fatani, A. A. (2011). Bacterial contamination of computer keyboards and mice, elevator buttons and shopping carts. African Journal of Microbiology Research, 5(23), 3998–4003. https://academicjournals.org/journal/AJMR/article-abstract/0C6929214156
Carter, T., Seah, S. A., Long, B., Drinkwater, B., & Subramanian, S. (2013). UltraHaptics: Multi-point mid-air haptic feedback for touch surfaces. UIST 2013 — Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 505–514. https://doi.org/10.1145/2501988.2502018
Kandel, C. E., Simor, A. E., & Redelmeier, D. A. (2014). Elevator buttons as unrecognized sources of bacterial colonization in hospitals. Open Medicine, 8(3), e81. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242253/
Kappus, B., & Long, B. (2018). Spatiotemporal modulation for mid-air haptic feedback from an ultrasonic phased array. 25th International Congress on Sound and Vibration 2018, ICSV 2018: Hiroshima Calling, 3, 1669–1674. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5036027
McGuffin, M. J., & Balakrishnan, R. (2005). Fitts’ law and expanding targets: Experimental studies and designs for user interfaces. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 12(4), 388–422. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1121112.1121115
Paneva, V., Seinfeld, S., Kraiczi, M., & Müller, J. (2020). HaptiRead: Reading Braille as Mid-Air Haptic Information. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06292