nwfdailynews.com — Whenever Richy Glassberg gets into an elevator to go to his midtown Manhattan office, he reflexively reaches to press the button for his floor. But there are no buttons. The buttons are in the lobby, at the base of the elevator bank. Elevator riders enter their floor number on a keypad and are directed by the display which elevator to ride.
Nov 16, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountNov 17, 2006
@EntropyMan"Old time" skyscraper elevators? All the tall buildings in Chicago have those today.
polygoneNov 17, 2006
Dugg for the title alone :P
rajulkabirNov 17, 2006
If it's anything like the building where I used to work, there is a keypad in the elevator lobby on each floor where you punch in the floor you want to go to. At that time the display would tell you which elevator (A, B, C, D, E, F) would be going there, so you could go stand in front of it.I thought it was a pretty horrible system from a user interface perspective.If you were distracted and forgot which elevator had been assigned to take you, you'd have to stick your head in and look at the display inside each one as it arrived, annoying the people already in it. Also, the system for entering one-digit floor numbers was odd, I think you had to press a special blank key and then the digit. If you just pressed "1", for example, it would wait for the second digit on the assumption that you might be entering 15 or something. And then when you never pressed another digit, it would just reset and forget about the 1, and no elevator would arrive.I found it hard to believe that the efficiency advantages outweighed the considerable human cost of having to learn a whole different way to operate a basic device.
nuggetzNov 17, 2006
Sounds efficient but people are too dumb.I had an idea of having an image sensor sense the number of people on an elevator just like the dude mentioned already. The weight sensor is a good idea too. Then, some bone head comments that the weight sensors are already implemented because the elevator buzzes. No s**t but is it used to control whether an elevator will stop on a floor if it's jam packed?
boyasunderNov 18, 2006
I work in one of these buildings (World Trade Center 1 in Portland) and I hate the system. I don't have real data, but it seems like you end up waiting a lot more for your elevator, so that it can stack you with other calls, than you would in a dumb system. Sometimes you'll type in a floor and while you're waiting for your car, another will come by and drop all of it people off and then leave (and it doesn't appear to be going anywhere, since each has a display showing to what floors it's headed). You end up standing there, dumbfounded as the elevator snubs you.But worst of all is the visitors who walk into your elevator lobby just as your doors are about to close and jump on, just in the nic of time. They're all pleased with themselves, for about five seconds, and then they get confused 'cause there's nothing inside to press. And then you have to explain the system, and they never get it, and you practically have to shove them out at your floor to get them to find the real floor buttons.Maybe there's a good set of these elevators out there, but the ones I work with everyday are not better, and probably worse, than the regular kind.
sigintNov 18, 2006
We have those in this building I'm working in. It's kinda takes some getting used to at first, but at least we're moving building soon. To a one storey kind.
Closed AccountNov 18, 2006
You forgot the one that's on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.