NEW YORK — Buttons that you can press by just pointing at them. Others that appear to float in the air, holograms seen more in sci-fi films than office buildings. Staggered employee arrivals and departures, and the rethinking, or even elimination, of the outside lunch break.
“You can redistribute office space, but they still have to get in and out of the building,” said Mark Gregorio, president of TEI Group, an elevator installation and repair company. “They still have to get from the street to their office. If you’re only running two or three people an elevator, it could be impossible to load a building. Rush hour could start at 5 a.m. and never end.”
A firm in Queens has developed the button that can be pressed when a rider points at it. Another offers Toe-to-Go, with pedals on the ground instead of buttons. There are gesture-controlled systems that are triggered with a wave of the hand, voice-activated systems and, by way of a Sacramento-based company, the hologram of buttons.
Building managers are studying a variety of innovations. “We’ve seen a lot of things come our way,” said Callie Haines, executive vice president at Brookfield Properties, where every tenant was handed a stylus for pushing elevator buttons until a smartphone-based system was installed in some of its skyscrapers, including the Grace Building facing Bryant Park.
Perhaps more urgently than new buttons, companies are also developing new ways to clean and circulate the air in an elevator, including powerful fans and blasts of ultraviolet light when no one is inside. In the meantime, new rules will bring about the death of the elevator pitch: “Wear a mask,” said Gregorio of TEI Group, “and don’t speak.”
Some of the same companies are exploring air-purification devices. Speranza at Nouveau described one that detects when the elevator is empty, and then stops the car for two or three minutes and bathes it with ultraviolet light. He considered the obvious what-if question. Reconstructing schedules around elevators is seen as an immediate given. Lerch Bates, an elevator consulting firm, wrote a report in April, “Vertical Transportation Back to Work Challenges,” that urged “flattening the tenant arrival rate curve” in light of less crowded cars.
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