Platform: Web
Software requirements: Chrome, Quicktime
How to begin:
Open your browser of choice and pull up http://web.mit.edu/scgreene/www/6.813.
Make sure Quicktime is allowed to run each time on the page, and your volume is on.
Background:
The goal of this project is to create a more efficient elevator system for 20+ story buildings. In this exercise, you will be moving through a tall building (in this case, 10 floors) with four elevators. Your goal is to get to a particular floor (you can pick whichever floor you want to go to in this exercise) by using the elevator system. You will notice that this elevator system is not your traditional elevator system.
You will go through three interfaces, each representing a display that you will see as you navigate the elevator system to your desired floor. The first screen you encounter in the interface is a screen on a vertical display in the lobby as you enter the building. The second interface is a display that appears above each elevator, and the third interface is the display that is inside the elevator you choose to enter.
Implementation:
The frontend of our prototype is almost completely implemented. However, we did not handle the case when the user enters an elevator moving further from their target floor. The backend is completely unimplemented. Each floor the user chooses is assigned to an elevator at random and the ETA is also random. In a true implementation, there would be an algorithm to optimize floor to elevator assignments and the ETAs would dynamically reflect the real ETA based on the number of floors in between and time of day (in an attempt to estimate the number of people going in and out).