4 ms·
The 'meteoric rise' of lifts: will a new breed of elevator transform our cities?
- WalterBright 10y agoIf I was an elevator designer, they'd accelerate upwards at about .3g and downwards at about .9g (leaving just enough gravity to keep you on the floor). Acceleration would be continuous.
- danieltillett 10y agoI am not sure I would want to get in your lift after a meal or with anyone who had eaten recently.
- WalterBright 10y agoI'd dub it the E-Ticket Elevator!
- danieltillett 10y agoI think 'Vomit Comet’ might be more accurate :)
- WalterBright 10y agoI'm not hiring you for my marketing department!
- rabboRubble 10y agoYou need to check that .3g number with pregnant women. I recall that the reason they accelerate they way they do current is to avoid having pregnant women urinate from the fetus pressing into the bladder.
- WalterBright 10y agoWhy don't elevators announce the floor they arrive at? Wouldn't that work much better for blind people?
- placeybordeaux 10y agoThe one in my building does.
- WalterBright 10y agoGood. I've never seen one - they may have chimes so the person has to count chimes.
- blakesterz 10y agoI've been in at least one (Hilton Tower DC) that does that, never occurred to me how useful that would be for the blind!
- wallacoloo 10y agoAt the very least, most elevators emit a beep when they pass each floor. This might not be true of faster moving elevators - I don't know.
- WalterBright 10y agoYou can get surprisingly decent speech output from a computer with nothing more than connecting a speaker to an I/O pin. So there's no more cost to that than a beeper. This is what is frustrating about the beepers!
- wallacoloo 10y agoBuildings have a host of different floor arrangements. In elevators, you'll see P1, P2 (parking), L (lobby), B (basement), LB (lower basement), UB (upper basement), M ("middle" floors, for buildings that have staggered floors), etc... Most elevators must know the name of the floor they're passing by (since they display it). But if you ship a speech system that just pronounces each symbol (e.g. "Floor pee one" or "Floor ell"), it may initially be confusing for most passengers ("What is 'floor ell'?"). A well-polished solution is going to take more effort by both the vendor and the client (and if it's not well-polished, the feature's likely to be considered a wart by those who don't actually need it). Plus, a beeper just needs to be audible - distortion is totally acceptable. A speech system will need a higher-spec'd amplifier and speakers (so that both components behave linearly over the full signal range) for the speech to be comprehensible. Far from insurmountable, but I think it'd be an error to say that there isn't more cost in announcing floor names than just beeping as you pass a floor. It's almost definitely marginal in the scheme of building costs, but it's there.