every time you walk past an automatic door, it opens whether you want it to or not; great blasts of wintry air enters the shop freezing staff and customers alike and huge amounts of expensive warmth escapes at the same time. its amazing how fast warm and cold air want to change places given half a chance.

now these doors will only open if they recognise the fact that you are striding manfully (stupid phrase that but I'll leave it for now)& exposing your face, smiling or not, towards the door; not sidling past it in a crablike fashion or walking away from it because for whatever reason you have changed your exiting/entering frame of mind.

there can always be an escape button if for some reason the doors don't like your face.
-- po, Jan 12 2008

{swish}...{/swish}
-- phoenix, Jan 12 2008


lol magic. your description has more to do with style-of-walking-detection than with face detection.
-- erlehmann, Jan 12 2008


Why not use Doppler shift? These sensors work by detecting infra-red from the person. Just shift the receptive wavelength slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum. That way, the doors will only open if you run really, really fast towards them.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 12 2008


[UnaBubba], it's the "will only open if they recognise the fact that you are striding manfully" part that hit me.
-- erlehmann, Jan 13 2008


At my old school, they were trying to reduce unnecessary opening on their automatic doors by setting sensitivity of the receptors very low. If I wanted to go through, I would either have to slow my walk to a crawl before I got to it, or give the door a big Heil Hitler salute as I came towards it. There was still a lot of unnecessary opening and closing of course. Somehow once you got inside, it could sense you sitting on the floor waiting for class ten yards away whenever you moved.

Yeah, I'm all for smarter automatic doors. I'm also all for escape buttons. Those would have been better than Heil Hitler waves.
-- ye_river_xiv, Jan 14 2008


better than - lol mfd I suppose.
-- po, Jan 16 2008


What's wrong with the pressure sensitive mats that adorn the doors at some K-Marts?...if you step on the mat, the door opens..there are guiding hand rails to set your course directly toward the doors...you would have to deliberately be stepping on and off to activate the doors without going through.
-- Blisterbob, Jan 16 2008


I'm bunning this, and there's a convulted (kind of) reason why:

My local Walgreens store (a super-pharmacy) has automatic doors. They are right next to each other and each is bi-directional. The checkout stand is nearest the door on the left (facing out) so naturally the door on the left is the one used most. However, the bulk of the parking is to the right. So, you walk directly past the sensor on the right hand side door, causing it to open. I find this to be a stupid waste of energy, and one easily solved by a simple Enter/Exit sign strategy. But po's idea would do the trick as well.

So, well done. [+]. Manfully or otherwise.
-- Noexit, Jan 17 2008


//an escape button//

You mean a handle?
-- squeak, Jan 17 2008


I never thought of that!
-- po, Jan 17 2008



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