  Conventional automatic doors cannot distinguish between people wishing to
pass through the door and people passing by the door, so they often open
unnecessarily. This leads to the need to adopt new systems in both commercial
and non-commercial environments: smart doors. In particular, a smart door
system predicts the intention of people near the door based on the social
context of the surrounding environment and then makes rational decisions about
whether or not to open the door. This work proposes the first position paper
related to smart doors, without bells and whistles. We first point out that the
problem not only concerns reliability, climate control, safety, and mode of
operation. Indeed, a system to predict the intention of people near the door
also involves a deeper understanding of the social context of the scene through
a complex combined analysis of proxemics and scene reasoning. Furthermore, we
conduct an exhaustive literature review about automatic doors, providing a
novel system formulation. Also, we present an analysis of the possible future
application of smart doors, a description of the ethical shortcomings, and
legislative issues.
