New Elevators

Technology coolness and evolution can be found everywhere.


Take an elevator for example. Simple thing, right? You step inside, choose the floor, done. If there are too many floors, then there's a dialpad, you type in the floor you need, done.

Now, if there are LOTS of people who want also to get to those places, you'll get high traffic around elevators. How would one solve the problem? Optimization anyone?

Well, as Joel Spolsky said on his blog post, there's a solution. Here's how it works:

You get near the elevators, you see a panel. On the panel you see dialpad and LCD screen. You type the floor you need to get to, and then on an LCD screen you see the elevator number you should take. You get into that elevator then, and that's it - there no possible way inside the cabin to choose floor. It just goes to that floor automatically.

Neat, isn't it? Such technology is implemented in IBM's offices in Petah Tikva, Israel; so if someone comes to visit Israel - I highly recommend to check this out.

Very cool.