Effective against bears and very lazy people. The spate of bear encounters in Japan has certainly been surprising for many reasons, but one thing that caught my attention especially is that they seem

Effective against bears and very lazy people.

The spate of bear encounters in Japan has certainly been surprising for many reasons, but one thing that caught my attention especially is that they seem pretty good at using automatic doors. I hope I’m not coming across as patronizing to any bears who might be reading this. I mean, I’ve been known to mistake a pane of glass for a door on more than one occasion myself.

▼ Just struts in like it’s no big deal

▼ This one struggled a bit, but it’s young; it’ll learn.

This is bad news for people, however. Bear encounters are bad enough in the outdoors, but being trapped in a confined space with one is a whole other level of terror. Given the number of incidents involving bears going through automatic doors, some businesses and facilities have set them to manual instead. While inconvenient for some, this poses a particular accessibility problem for disabled people.

Speaking of whom, Fulltech and Mirairo are two companies that have been developing Mirairo Door. This automatic door can communicate with smartphones via Bluetooth and was originally intended for use by people with varying levels of mobility so they could adjust the speed at which the door closes to suit their needs on their phones.

It just so happens that these doors are also really good at keeping bears and other wildlife out of buildings. Mirairo Door can also be set so that only people with smartphones can access the door’s automatic feature, and since bears are currently unable to purchase such devices, they cannot go through.

▼ The app better have a clear “no-bear” clause in its Terms and Conditions, too.

One drawback is that you need to install the Mirairo Door app on your phone for it to work, but once you do, it works all on its own when near a compatible door. But even without the app, the doors have touch switches and are still relatively easy to open. I suppose a bear could hit the touch switch too, but it’s still a much bigger hurdle than conventional automatic doors.

It does offer a solution for businesses and other organizations who want to keep their doors closed to dangerous animals but also don’t want to hinder other people from coming inside. For now, at least…

Given the rate at which the bears have managed to disrupt our infrastructure, I give them about three years before they acquire quantum computing technology that can decrypt the elliptic-curve discrete logarithmic problem and override the doors’ controls. Hopefully, by that time, better bearproof encryption for wireless devices will have been developed.