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A live demonstration · Frederick, MD

We design
spaces people
remember.

Hardware, firmware, gameplay, set design — built end to end in Frederick, Maryland, for venues, products, and rooms where someone assumed everyone could speak, hear, or stand still. Thirty-seven experiences in one browser tab. Nothing to install.

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this device · awaiting global feed
Est. 1891 · Frederick, MD · Deaf for 132 years
132
Years Deaf · since 1891
Frederick, MD
Designed, soldered, shipped
37
Live experiences in this tab

What you're looking at.

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

01

Real-time, real-room.

Live computer vision, running locally. Nothing recorded. Nothing sent away. The latency is short enough that a room feels alive, not laggy.

02

Story over screens.

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

03

Designed for the body that's here.

Built for whoever actually shows up — hands full, voice tired, hearing aids in, signing instead of speaking. Universal as a starting point, not a retrofit.

Universal Design Argument

The case for a touchless,
signless world.

Most technology around us assumes you can speak. Voice alone is exclusionary, noisy, and unnecessary as a default — and millions of people already navigate the world without it. A camera that watches the hands is quieter, more private, and more universal. Thirty-six handshapes cover the alphabet and the digits — most people learn them in an afternoon — and the cameras to run it are already in everyone's pocket. No new science required.

Touchless and signless. Both. For everyone.

Read the full essay · 5-page PDF →

7.5M
Americans estimated to have trouble using their voices, per NIDCD. ²
36
Handshapes — A through Z and 0 through 9 — learnable in an afternoon.
~5B
Smartphones with cameras that can already run this. ³
0
New science required. The pieces are 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 is one of the most important frontiers in machine learning — and it's not our work. 1891 is an interactive experience company. We use what already ships today (handshape, fingerspelling, gesture) to make ordinary spaces feel better, for more people.

The longer version (blog post) →

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English words you can spell with the 26 letters this technology already recognizes
26 handshapes. ∞ words. The full vocabulary, available right now.

Thirty-seven experiences. One demonstration.

There are three of us — Anthony, Jon, and our sister Amy — and we grew up inventing games together. Card games at the kitchen table. Made-up tag rules in the yard. Friday-night quizzes between slices. By the time we were teenagers we'd already designed more games than we could remember. So when the technology in this demo finally worked, the catalog didn't grow by accident — it grew because this is what we DO.

A lot of the demos still carry that DNA on purpose. Gisele (Anthony's daughter) co-pilots Star Patrol. Free Throw Drill is Jon's — he's Team USA's 2025 Tokyo Deaflympics flagbearer, so the basketball game in this catalog had to be his. Mowl Farm counts the animals on the homestead Peter Mowl bought in 1803. Buck's Pizza hosts Amy and Anthony and Jon on a Friday-night fraction drill. Fallon coaches from the sideline in Tic-Tac-Toe. The rest are the doors, the kiosks, the keypads, the wellbeing rooms — the public-facing reasons we're showing this to you in the first place.

Four rooms, scroll sideways through any of them. Tap a 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."

1891 was founded to work on these alongside the teams that own them.

Honest about the limits

What we tell every client up front.

Signing isn't universal — tactile buttons and spoken alternatives stay. Privacy matters — signed PINs pair with a second factor. Recognition has limits — we design for what ships today and degrade gracefully. And the room matters — lighting and camera placement are part of every install.

The longer version (blog post) →

"Our family has been Deaf since 1891. 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.

1891 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.

The first conversation is free. From there, three typical shapes — and a handful of variations we'll walk you through when it's time.

01
Free · 60–90 min

Working session

A focused conversation. We bring three to five patterns from your roadmap that fit, costed and ranked. You leave with a doc.

02
3–8 weeks

Custom prototype

A working prototype built around your space, vocabulary, and brand — like the demos on this page, but yours. Often the cheapest way to turn "should we?" into "when?"

03
Project-scoped

Install plan + build

Full design + engineering spec for a venue installation, then the build itself. Hardware, firmware, gameplay, set design, training. Soldered and shipped from Frederick.

See the full menu — audits, talks, workshops, advisory →

Case studies · Real work

What we've actually shipped.

Two of the clients we've taken end-to-end. Both case studies have live, try-it-in-browser tools embedded in the post — same code that runs on the client's actual site, just restyled to live here. Not screenshots. The thing.

Partner · Education · Brother company

Play With ASL

Jon Mowl's gamified-ASL company — fourth-generation Deaf, SCORE national-pitch 2nd place, AWS × Deloitte Social Entrepreneur Accelerator. Five of the Pro demos you can preview here are the seeds of PWA's paid roadmap.

10 min read · Anthony Mowl →
Client · Software · Travel

Fairytale Dreamers Travel

A Deaf-led travel agency. Hand-coded site, agent CRM, email pipeline routed around a $15-a-month SaaS bill. Two of the on-site tools — the ride-height planner and the ASL-interpreter schedule — are embedded in the case study.

8 min read · Anthony Mowl →
Client · Hardware + software · Venue

Blast'D! Arena

Frederick's family arena, top to bottom. Device mesh, central game engine, 75-inch live big board, marshal dashboard, public site. The games picker from the live site is embedded in the case study.

9 min read · Anthony Mowl →

All case studies + essays →

Bring us to your team

Talks, workshops, on-site
demonstrations.

Keynotes, half-day workshops, full-day intensives, demo days, custom prototypes, ongoing advisory. Frederick-based, and we travel everywhere.

Discuss a booking → See all formats → 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

Compliance is the floor. We'll help you find the ceiling — the design choices that turn an accessibility report into a moment guests actually remember.

Tell us about your project.

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

No email scraping. We track which demos you explore so we know what's working; your data stays with 1891.
132 years Deaf · Frederick, MD · since 1891
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 1891'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 1891 Immersive Experiences, Frederick MD and link this page. If we cite you, we'll do the same.

1891
ImmersiveLive Demonstration

Pick an experience.

Thirty-seven self-contained demonstrations across four categories. All controlled by your hand in front of the camera — no keyboard. A growing free tier is open right now. The rest unlock with a one-time email.

Want the other eight?

Drop an email. We'll send the unlock link.

One email. About once a quarter you'll get a short note when a new space ships. Reply "stop" any time.

Your name + email unlock the rest of the experiences across this browser. We never spam — about one short note per quarter. We track which demos you explore so we know what's working; your data stays with 1891.
1891
Mode 01Demo

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.

No hand
A
Step 1 of 24