With the summer of live events fast approaching the ability to measure footfall and analyse crowd density is a paramount consideration when managing attendee safety and movement.
Most festivals continue to rely on entrance counting to record how many people have entered. Once inside quantifiable information about which areas attendees are in remains challenging and costly. Experienced crowd managers continue to monitor movement and behaviour from security positions, such as fire towers and concert pits, they can only see one side of the story. The skill of those who monitor crowds is not in question but with ever growing site size, multiple entertainment areas and larger camp sites an effective system for low cost monitoring is required.
Exhibitions also continue to use entrance counting but exhibitors are starting to request information about the busiest areas as they convince their organisations to invest in floor space with maximum exposure.
Etherlive LEFA People Counting
Our launch of LEFA (Live Event Footfall Analytics) at the Showman’s Show received very positive feedback from those looking for a system to support their crowd management teams. The system is capable of accurately and immediately counting flow and density of crowds. The system can also provide pressure overlays to assist in the identification of potential flare hotspots such as moshing or overcrowding.
The LEFA toolkit includes an event control dashboard, viewable from tablets using the secure event management network, which summarises key count and crowd hotspot information as well as being coupled to live CCTV viewing.
LEFA is highly customisable. Alerts which activate SMS or email systems can be put in place which trigger if key criteria are met (over x amount of people within tent 2 for example).
With powerful data logging detailed post event reports can be produced displaying ingress, egress and crowd flows throughout the event broken down into customisable time periods. This provides excellent insight into peak flow periods at different parts of a venue facilitating data driven adjustments in staffing and approach.
The opportunity for large scale event organisations to increase their event intelligence has never been better.