How do we avoid personal interactions and physical touchpoints in retail, theme parks, and other physical venues? We can build upon or replace existing touchscreen experiences with a suite of touchless interactions to create engaging experiences — at a safe distance. Jump straight to the live demos!

In addition to innovative technologies like voice control or gestural control, we might have another solution in our pockets. Our smartphones can become a universal remote for digital/physical contexts, a private touchscreen that avoids the risks of shared surfaces.

• It's an interaction customers know. Customers worldwide already use their phones to make contactless payments ^{1, 2, 3} and to order and pay ahead for curbside pickup or drive-thru.^{4, 5}
• Decades of research back it up. Designers and researchers have long talked about letting existing computers "annex" personal devices for input and output ⁶, and modern technologies can mitigate the security and privacy concerns.
• Retailers are already starting to explore it. Some retailers and cultural institutions are already rolling out new ways to use phones to control and enhance their existing physical experiences.^{7, 8, 9}
• Your customers will prefer it. Valtech's own customer research has indicated that using a personal phone as a controller ranks higher than voice control and gesture control in overall level of satisfaction (7.8/10), ease of adoption (92% said easy or very easy to learn how to use), and level of comfort with using in a public space (7.8/10).

Valtech knows connected experiences. This site collects our growing list of prototypes for low-touch and touchless physical experiences that combine gestural interactions, voice commands, and connected personal smartphones.

Each use case for a touchless experience brings its own advantages and challenges. In retail spaces, for example, high foot traffic demands touchless solutions that distinguish between a user's hands and those of a bystander. In a museum setting, touchless experiences must be robust and adaptable enough to work in dark or unusual lighting conditions.

Our approaches here are cross-platform and use off-the shelf technologies, so you can test them yourself with your computer's camera or your smartphone.

Please note that the live video feed in these demos is run locally and is completely private.

Touchless is open source. In the spirit of collaboration, we are share our knowledge and research with the public to continue building further innovation.

Fork our repo and build your own touchless prototypes here:

https://github.com/valtech-sd/touchless/

Please note that the live video feed in these demos is run locally and is completely private.