Live demonstration · Frederick, MD

Ordinary spaces.
Unforgettable
experiences.

1892 Immersive Experiences designs interactive systems for real-world venues. Touchless, hands-driven, universal by design. This is a live demonstration of what we build — seventeen experiences in a single browser tab. Nothing to install.

Est. 1892 · Frederick, MD · Built end to end in house

What you're looking at.

A single demonstration of the type of interactive system we build — running on a regular laptop and a regular webcam. Each mode shows a different way an immersive space can react to the people inside it.

01

Real-time, real-room.

Live computer vision, running locally. Nothing recorded. Nothing sent away. Designed for the kind of latency that makes a room feel alive.

02

Story over screens.

Every mode is shaped around a moment — unlock the door, play the game, place the order. The technology disappears. The experience stays.

03

Made for everyone.

Signless, touchless, quiet. Hands work for people who can't speak, for noisy rooms, for sensitive ears, for crowded ones, for hands that learned ASL in elementary school.

Universal Design Argument

The case for a touchless,
signless world.

Most of the technology around us assumes you can speak.

"Hey Siri." "Okay Google." "Alexa, turn off the lights." The voice-activated future has been confidently announced — and it quietly excludes anyone who can't, or shouldn't, talk to a machine.

Per the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, an estimated 7.5 million Americans have trouble using their voices. Many more navigate the world with laryngitis, anxiety, autism, language barriers, or environments too loud, too quiet, or too sensitive for speech to work reliably. ²

Meanwhile, the ASL alphabet and the numbers 0 through 9 can be learned by most people in an afternoon. After that, silent interaction with a well-designed surface becomes possible — ordering food without yelling at a speaker, opening a gate without grabbing a sticky handle, picking a floor without touching a shared button cluster.

The case isn't that voice is bad. The case is that voice alone is exclusionary, noisy, and unnecessary as a default. A surface that watches the hands is more universal, more private, and quieter. Sign-based interfaces are a complement to existing controls — never a replacement.

Touchless and signless. Both. For everyone.

7.5M
Americans estimated to have trouble using their voices, per NIDCD. ²
36
Handshapes — A through Z and 0 through 9 — most people can learn in an afternoon.
~5B
Smartphones already in use globally, all with cameras capable of running this kind of recognition. ³
0
New science required. The pieces these demos use are all off-the-shelf.
A note on what we don't do

We don't build sign-language AI.
We use it.

Full sign-language translation — continuous signed sentences, facial-expression nuance, two-handed compounds — is one of the most important frontiers in machine learning. It's also not our work. That's the work of interpreting agencies, research labs, and AI companies, and we're cheering for them.

Our work is different. 1892 is an interactive experience company. We use the recognition tech that's available today — handshape, fingerspelling, gesture — to make ordinary spaces feel better, for more people. We're consumers of that research, not producers of it. We're the demand side.

The reason we can ship now is that the pieces we actually need are already ready. Static handshapes. Numbers. A small gesture set. That's enough for thousands of useful interactive moments — and most of the spaces in our lives are missing those moments today.

What we use
  • Static handshape recognition (A–Z)
  • Number recognition (0–9)
  • Universal gestures (ILY, 👍, 👎)
  • Single-hand motion (J, Z, simple swipes)
  • Context-aware limited-vocabulary UIs
  • Fingerspelling-based selection and input
Watching closely
  • Two-handed compound signs at speed
  • Continuous fingerspelling (chained letters)
  • Common-vocab single-sign recognition (~500 signs)
  • Facial-expression markers as grammar
  • Regional dialect adaptation
Not our lane
  • Full conversational sign-language translation
  • Real-time bidirectional interpreting
  • Wearable-camera language access
  • Discourse-level prosody and tone
  • Cross-language sign-to-sign translation
—
English words you can spell with the 26 letters this technology already recognizes
26 handshapes. ∞ words. The full vocabulary, available right now.

Seventeen experiences. One demonstration.

Each mode is a different real-world use case — pick the one that matches the room you're designing for, or run them in sequence. Tap any card to read the full rationale before you launch it.

Why we built each one.

None of these are "demos for the sake of demos." Every mode is a real use case we've watched venues, schools, and families struggle with — and a working proof that the fix doesn't need to be expensive, proprietary, or complicated.

01

Keypad

Every locker room, gym back door, employee lounge, and members-only space has a keypad. Making it touchless and inclusive costs nothing and benefits everyone — Deaf customers, gloved hands, kids who can't reach the buttons, people with arthritis.

02

Letter Trainer

Exposure to ASL in elementary school changes how a generation grows up. A self-running kiosk in a library, museum, or doctor's waiting room teaches three letters per visitor — invisibly, ambiently, without a teacher. Over a year, that's a community shift.

03

Free Spell

The most universal act of selfhood is writing your name. Doing it with your hands — and seeing it appear ten feet tall — turns any room into an art piece. Wedding signing books. Museum guestbooks. The kids' table at a venue.

04

Mac Control

Specialty assistive devices cost thousands. A webcam and a laptop are already in every classroom in America. This mode says: if the cheap thing can do it, the cheap thing should do it. ASL is a viable input modality, full stop.

05

Speed Sign

Competition transforms learning. A leaderboard turns alphabet practice into a Friday-night activity. A summer camp tournament. A school assembly with a high-score wall. Compete and you remember. Memorize and you forget.

06

Smart Home

The question "what's your native language" usually doesn't include "the one you operate your house with." It should. A Deaf homeowner's smart home shouldn't require speaking to Alexa. Their first language is the command interface.

07

Drive-Thru

Drive-thru ordering is one of the most persistent accessibility concerns raised by Deaf and hard-of-hearing customers — and a recurring subject of ADA-related advocacy and litigation, including class-action settlements with McDonald's (2018) and Burger King (2019). Solving it doesn't require Bluetooth, an app, or a QR code. Just a screen and a camera. The technology is ready; deployment is a decision. ¹

08

Elevator

Nearly every multi-story office, hospital, hotel, and transit hub depends on elevators — a near-universal access surface in modern infrastructure. Touchless dispatch is safer post-pandemic and inclusive by default. The button on the wall stays for backup. The camera on the ceiling does the additional work.

09

Sound Booth

Music doesn't belong to people with working ears. Deaf percussionists like Evelyn Glennie taught the world that music is felt before it's heard. A drum pad doesn't care who you are. This mode strips music to its essence: pattern, rhythm, vibration.

10

Songs

The bridge. Deaf kids deserve to "play" Twinkle Twinkle the way hearing kids do. Hearing kids deserve to encounter ASL through music they already love. Two communities meeting in the middle — through their own first language. The paradox is the point.

11

ATM

One of the most widely-deployed self-service interfaces in retail banking. Per NIDCD, around 7.5 million Americans have trouble using their voices; many more navigate touchscreens with motor or sensory difficulty. Bringing the ATM forward into a universal-design era is overdue. A camera-augmented machine works alongside the existing tactile interface — not as a replacement.

12

Companion

A face that smiles when you sign love. The longer no one passes by, the sadder it gets. One ILY brings it right back. Install it in a hallway and watch what happens — kids learn that their gestures land somewhere, and they learn it without anyone teaching them. Social-emotional learning that runs itself.

13

Kindness Wall

Most acts of kindness are invisible. A smile in a hallway, a quiet "thank you" — they happen and they evaporate. The Kindness Wall makes them visible: every ILY drops a heart, and dozens accumulate through the day. Hospitals, schools, foster centers, shelters. The room learns what a kind day feels like.

14

Affirmation Mirror

A counselor's office. A therapist's waiting room. A calm-down corner. The hard part of helping a kid is getting them to slow down enough to hear what you're telling them. A mirror that says "you are seen" without asking anything of them does an enormous amount of quiet work.

If you can't imagine the bridge,
you'll never build it.

Each demonstration on this page runs on commodity hardware — a recent laptop, a standard webcam, and the same open-source vision toolkit used in research labs and consumer apps. None of it is novel. All of it is overdue.

"What's missing isn't science. It's the willingness to design for the people who don't fit the spec. A drive-thru that listens with its eyes. A keypad that doesn't need a touch. A music class that doesn't need a hearing aid."

1892 was founded to work on these alongside the teams that own them.

Honest about the limits

What we tell every client up front.

We don't believe in oversell. These are the limits of the kinds of systems on this page, written down on purpose, so you can plan around them.

01

Signing isn't universal.

Some people can't sign — amputees, people with motor or cognitive disabilities, people who simply haven't learned. Every interface we design assumes signing is one option among many. The tactile button stays. The touchscreen stays. The spoken alternative stays. We design for inclusion, never replacement.

02

Privacy is real.

Signing a PIN in front of a camera means anyone watching can see your PIN — over your shoulder, on a security recording, in a reflection. For authentication-grade installs, sign input is paired with another factor (facial recognition, a card swipe, a separate confirmation). The Keypad and ATM demos here are illustrative — the production version layers in the second factor.

03

Recognition has limits.

Today's classifier is reliable on static handshapes, digits, and a handful of universal gestures. It's not ready for continuous, conversational sign language. We design interfaces that work brilliantly within today's limits — and degrade gracefully when something falls outside them. That's what separates an install from a research demo.

04

The room matters.

A camera in a dim hallway with backlight is going to struggle. Camera placement, lighting, screen visibility, and physical ergonomics are part of every install — and part of every site survey. We design with the room, not just the screen.

"Our family has been Deaf since 1892. The interfaces you've just seen are the ones we've been quietly working around our entire lives."
Anthony Mowl Founder · Frederick, Maryland

A family story.

1892 is the year our family went Deaf. Five generations later, we're still here — designing the kinds of rooms and interfaces we wish had been there all along. The demonstrations on this page aren't speculative. They're solutions to problems we live every day.

We work with product teams, venue operators, and corporations to bring patterns like these into the real world. The lived experience is ours. The end product is yours.

How we work

How we work with teams.

These are the typical engagements. The first one is free, because we'd rather show you what's possible in your roadmap than describe it abstractly.

01
Free · 60–90 min

Working session

A focused conversation. We bring three to five specific patterns from your existing roadmap that benefit from sign or touchless equivalents — designed, costed, and ranked by impact. You leave with a doc. This is the on-ramp, and it usually surprises people.

02
1–3 weeks

Interface audit

We review your existing product, service blueprint, or venue map and produce a written audit of the accessibility moments hiding in plain sight. Each one comes with a clear recommendation: skip, hold, prototype, ship.

03
3–8 weeks

Custom prototype

A working prototype built around your specific space, vocabulary, and brand — like the demos on this page, but yours. Often the cheapest way to get budget approval: the conversation changes from "should we?" to "when?"

04
Project-scoped

Install plan

Full design + engineering spec for a venue installation. Camera positions, screen specs, software architecture, content strategy, ADA + privacy review. The handoff doc your engineering and venue teams can build from.

05
Half- or full-day

Talks, workshops, training

Conferences. Design-team workshops. School assemblies. Frederick-based, with travel everywhere. Bring 1892 to your team to plant the seeds — the demos do the rest.

Bring us to your team · Travel-ready

Talks, workshops, on-site
demonstrations.

We're available for keynotes, design-team workshops, on-site demo days, custom prototype builds, and ongoing advisory. Frederick-based, and we travel everywhere.

60 min

Keynote & fireside

For conferences, all-hands meetings, design summits, and accessibility conferences. The full case for universal-design interactive systems, delivered live with the demo on stage.

Conferences · All-hands · Industry events
3–4 hr

Half-day workshop

For design and product teams (5–30 people). Hands-on with the live demo, working sessions on your specific roadmap, three concrete recommendations they can ship in the next quarter.

Design teams · PM groups · Engineering orgs
7–8 hr

Full-day intensive

The half-day workshop, deeper. Site survey if applicable, prototype scoping, written deliverable, follow-up call in two weeks. Best for teams about to commit to a real install.

Venue teams · Product leadership · Accessibility groups
1 day on-site

Demo day

We bring the full kit to your space — laptop, screen, presenter — and run live demonstrations for staff, students, stakeholders. Great for board meetings, school assemblies, family events, donor moments.

Schools · Boards & donors · Internal stakeholder days
3–8 weeks

Custom prototype

We design and build a working interactive demo tailored to your venue, brand, and vocabulary. Same engineering depth as the demos on this page — your context, your interface. The cheapest way we know to turn "should we?" into "when?"

Venue installs · Product prototypes · Pilot programs
Quarterly

Ongoing advisory

A continuing relationship. Quarterly check-ins, ongoing access by email, a seat at your design reviews. For organizations integrating universal-design thinking into a recurring product pipeline.

Enterprise accessibility teams · Long-term partnerships
Discuss a booking → Pricing scales with scope. The first conversation is always free.
What we believe

Six principles
that shape every install.

If you only take a few things from this page, take these. They're how we make the decisions you don't see us making.

01

Inclusion, never replacement.

Every interface we design is one option among many. The tactile button stays. The touchscreen stays. The spoken alternative stays. Sign is the addition. Removing existing options to add ours is never the answer.

02

Build for the people who fail your interface.

The product team always knows who passes the interface — the median user, the easy case. The harder, more valuable question is who fails it. That's where the work is. That's where the next 20% of usable design lives.

03

Voice is one input, not the only one.

"Hey Siri" assumes you can speak. "Alexa" assumes you want to. Neither is true for everyone, and the room never matches the spec sheet. Cameras don't care. Build for cameras. Then add voice.

04

The medium isn't the point. The moment is.

Sign-and-touchless is a means, not an end. The work is the moment in the room — the door that opens, the order that lands, the kid who sees themselves seen. The technology disappears as soon as it's working.

05

Cost is no longer the barrier.

The camera is already on every device. The screen is already on every wall. The recognition runs in the browser. The economics that used to disqualify universal-design upgrades disappeared a decade ago. What remains is the decision.

06

The kindest interface is the truest one.

An interface that meets a person where they are, without making them ask, without making them apologize, without making them perform — that's the gold standard. Everything else is in service of that.

The bottom line

Cost is no longer
the barrier. Desire is.

Every interface on this page runs on hardware that already exists in every venue. The camera is on every device. The screen is on every wall. The recognition runs in the browser, for free. The cost of putting an interface like this into a room dropped to near zero a decade ago.

What's missing is the imagination — and the decision — to do it.

Work With Us

Bring these ideas into your roadmap.

If you're designing a venue, a product, an interface — or if you're responsible for someone who is — let's talk. A 90-minute working session is usually enough to find three places in your existing roadmap where this fits.

01

Product teams

Building an app, kiosk, or onboarding flow? We'll audit it for sign-and-touchless equivalents and tell you exactly where they pay off.

02

Venue + retail operators

Designing a drive-thru, a hotel, a museum, an entertainment venue? We'll map the accessibility moments that your guests notice and the ones they don't.

03

Corporate accessibility teams

Hitting ADA-plus targets is the floor. We'll help you find the ceiling — the design choices that turn your accessibility report into your brand story.

Tell us about your project.

A few quick questions so we walk in prepared. We reply within two business days.

No email scraping. No tracking. We just want to talk.
5 generations Deaf · Frederick, MD · since 1892
Notes & sources

Where the numbers come from.

Every claim on this page should be checkable. The references below back up the statistics and the legal context we cite. If you find an error or a stronger source, please tell us — we'll update.

  1. 1.
    Drive-thru ADA litigation: Magee v. McDonald's USA, LLC (E.D. La., settled 2018) and subsequent settlements with Burger King and other chains framed the legal landscape on drive-thru accessibility for Deaf customers. See also the National Association of the Deaf's accessibility advocacy.
  2. 2.
    Speech/voice statistics: "Approximately 7.5 million people in the United States have trouble using their voices." — National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), Statistics on Voice, Speech, and Language.
  3. 3.
    Smartphone penetration: Approximately 4.9–5 billion smartphones in active use worldwide as of recent industry reports (Statista, GSMA). All current smartphones include cameras and processing capable of on-device hand-landmark recognition via libraries like Google's MediaPipe.
  4. 4.
    Hand-tracking pipeline: Hand detection in this demonstration uses MediaPipe Hands, Google's open-source 21-landmark hand-pose model. The handshape classifier and context-aware dispatch on top of it are 1892's own work — for a research-grade vocabulary, custom training would be appropriate.
  5. 5.
    ASL alphabet learning time: "An afternoon" is an estimate consistent with introductory ASL curricula used by Gallaudet University outreach and elementary-school exposure programs; not a peer-reviewed measure. Individual times vary.

If you cite us, please cite 1892 Immersive Experiences, Frederick MD and link this page. If we cite you, we'll do the same.

1892
ImmersiveLive Demonstration

Pick an experience.

Fourteen self-contained demonstrations across five categories. All controlled by your hand in front of the camera — no keyboard. Filter to find the ones for your room, or run them all.

1892
Mode 01Demo
1892
Mode 01Keypad
Camera Live
–
Detected
1892 WELCOME 1892 SIGN YOUR PIN · 4 DIGITS
WELCOME
Access granted
Sign your PIN Default 1·8·9·2 — set in settings
1892
Mode 02Letter Trainer
Camera Live
–
You signed
Sign this letter
A
0
Correct
0
Streak
0s
Time

Tip: J and Z use motion — hold the starting position. The others lock in when you hold the handshape steady for about a second.

A

Sign the letter on the right.

Hold the shape steady for about a second. The bar fills as you charge, then locks in. Don't worry about being perfect — every confident lock-in also trains the model on your hand.

  • 🤟 ILY at any time to skip a letter you don't know yet.
  • The colored rail under the target shows your per-letter accuracy.
  • Letters J / Z use motion in real ASL — hold the start pose for now.
1892
Mode 03Free Spell
Camera Live
–
You signed

Your message.

Sign anything
A
Sign a letter — anything — to begin.
🤟 ILY = space 👍 OK = save 👎 NOK = delete last

Hold a handshape steady to lock the letter in. ILY adds a space. OK saves as PNG. Saved images carry a 1892 watermark + QR.

1892
Mode 04Mac Control
Bridge offline
Camera Live
–
Sent

Type into any app.

Real Mac control

Letters you sign get typed into whatever Mac app currently has focus. Requires 1892_mac_bridge.py running on this computer.

1892
Mode 05Speed Sign
Camera Live
0.00
Sign 🤟 ILY to start
–
You signed
Race the ABCs
Count 0–9
Count to 20
Spell a word
0.00
Seconds
A
Show ILY 🤟 to start. Show ILY again to stop.

Best times

1892
Mode 06Smart Home
Camera Live
–
You signed
Garage Lights Music Front gate Heat Curtains Time Welcome Off (Goodnight)
Welcome home.
Night

Smart home controls.

Sign to operate

Sign any letter below and watch the house react. Imagine these as the actual fixtures in a venue, gym, or hotel lobby.

G
Garage door
Roll open or closed
L
Lights
Porch + windows · beams at night
M
Music
Smart speaker · ambient waves
F
Front gate
Open or close
H
Heat / Fireplace
Drifting chimney smoke
C
Curtains
Window privacy
T
Time of day
Dawn → Day → Dusk → Night
W
Welcome scene
Car arrives · everything on
O
Goodnight scene
Curtains close · lights out
1892
Mode 07Drive-Thru
Camera Live
–
You signed
🚗
You're at the menu board
Sign your order through the windshield

1892 BURGERS

Drive-Thru · Open 24/7 · Frederick, MD
🤟 SIGN & ORDER · ADA ACCESSIBLE
Your order
— nothing yet —
Total$0.00

Show 👍 thumbs up when finished · Show 👎 to cancel

✓

Order received!

→
Please proceed to the second window.
Estimated wait: ~4 min
Order #1042 · Window 2
1892
Mode 08Elevator
Camera Live
–
You signed
01
Call the elevator

Show 👍 for up or 👎 for down.

02
Pick your floor

Once doors open, sign a digit 1–9, or L, B, P.

03
Doors close, ride, arrive

The elevator does the rest — no buttons touched, no voice required.

1892 BUILDING
L UP DOWN 1892
Show 👍 for up, 👎 for down.
L
Welcome to the Lobby Doors opening · Please step in
1892
Mode 09Sound Booth
Camera Live
–
You signed
Audio runs locally in the browser. Click the page once if you don't hear anything (browser autoplay rule).

Sample pads.

Sign to play

Eight synth pads. Sign the letter on a pad and it fires. Stack them together, find a rhythm.

1892
Mode 10Songs
Camera Live
–
You signed
A bridge between two languages. Sign each letter to play the next note — the song teaches itself.

Play a song with your hands.

A → G are notes
Pick a song
A through G are real musical notes. Sign each letter in order and the song plays.
–
Sign the highlighted letter 0 / 0

Show ILY 🤟 to restart at any time. Sign a wrong letter and you'll hear that note — but the song only advances on the right one.

1892
Mode 11ATM
Camera Live
–
You signed
01
Start the session

Show 👍 to begin. Then enter your PIN — default 1892.

02
Pick what you'd like to do

W Withdraw · B Balance · R Reset PIN · 👍 End

03
Confirm and walk away

Choose an account, amount, then 👍 confirms or 👎 cancels.

Frederick, MD
1892
Mode 12Companion
Camera Live
–
You signed
①
Companion is waiting for you

The longer no one passes, the sadder they get.

②
Show ILY 🤟 to lift their mood

One sign brings the smile right back. Anyone can do it. Anyone can pass it on.

③
Walk away — they'll fade

That's the point. The next person to walk by gets to fix it too.

Companion
0
Acts of love today
SADNEUTRALHAPPY
Show ILY 🤟 to brighten Companion's day.
1892
Mode 13Kindness Wall
Camera Live
–
You signed
①
Every ILY 🤟 drops a heart

A new glowing heart joins the wall the moment you sign.

②
Hearts accumulate through the day

Anyone who walks by can add one. The counter climbs.

③
Tomorrow, fresh start

The wall resets each morning. So does the world.

Kindness Wall 1892 · today
0
Acts of kindness today
Sign ILY 🤟 to add a heart to the wall.
1892
Mode 14Affirmation Mirror
Camera Live
–
You signed
①
Stand and breathe

This is a slow place. Take a second.

②
Show ILY 🤟 to the mirror

An affirmation appears for you to read.

③
Stay as long as you'd like

Each kind word joins the wall. Read them all if you want.

Show ILY 🤟 to begin.
A mirror for one of those moments. Sign when you're ready.
1892
Mode 15Mirror Me
The room is dark until you sign. Show ILY 🤟 to reveal yourself.
Camera Live
–
You signed

The mirror signs back.

Tracks your hand

A giant ILY 🤟 appears on screen and follows your hand wherever it moves. Change handshape or drop your hand, and it fades. Designed for therapy rooms, recovery spaces, and anyone practicing the small bravery of letting love land.

🤟
Show ILY to begin
Thumb + index + pinky out, middle + ring curled.
↺
Move your hand
The mirrored sign tracks your position in real time.
✕
Drop or change
The sign gently fades away.

Best with the lights warm and the room quiet.

1892
Mode 16Ice Cream Stand
Camera Live
–
You signed
①
Sign a flavor

V · C · S · B · L · R · F · Y

②
Stack up to four scoops

Each letter adds one.

③
👍 to finish

Cherry and sprinkles on top.

Bessie's Ice Cream FREDERICK, MD · EST. 1892 SCOOPS · CONES · SUNDAES OPEN · WALK UP
Sign a flavor letter to add a scoop.
1892
Mode 17Movie Marquee
Camera Live
–
You signed
①
Pick tonight's movie

Sign A, C, D, F, R, S, or W.

②
Ticket prints

Your seat is assigned automatically.

③
👍 to confirm

👎 swaps your pick.

1892 CINEMA TONIGHT — NOW SHOWING TICKETS
1892 CINEMA · ADMIT ONE
—
Showing tonight
SEAT —
Sign a letter to pick tonight's show. 👍 to confirm.

Teach the system your hands.

This walks through a short calibration so the system learns how you sign each letter. About 30 seconds. Hold each handshape steady when prompted, then click Capture.

A
Step 1 of 24