SMARTER CITIES

The world is getting more crowded, and more urban. By 2050 the UN expects population to top 9 billion, with some 67% living in cities. The challenge is not only the absolute numbers but the rapidity of the influx and its social diversity. Never before have societies had to cope with sudden population change on this scale.

At the same time, a near-invisible layer of technology, embedded in the world around us, is reconfiguring the way we relate to physical space. Cityscapes are being transformed by complex technologies and devices – from identity tags to miniature sensors – instrumenting infrastructure on a mass scale and animating buildings and spaces with data and interactive services. The new urban environment can not only monitor, measure, collect, fuse, mine, share and communicate data but can also adapt in response – becoming an active agent in city life.

Technological progress, especially the proliferation of smart phones, is also turning each one of us into a moving sensor, receiver, tracker, commentator and broadcaster. Enabled by location-based technologies, the explosion of apps, and more pervasive mobile connectivity, the gap is narrowing between our physical and digital lives.

This new landscape suggests a profound change in the way that people control and participate in their city environment. No longer passive subjects in anonymous top-down structures, we are now empowered with real-time data to inform decisions on how to engage with the systems and services our cities can offer. At an aggregate level, the city – with its complex human, physical and digital dimensions – has started to improve and regulate itself.

One of the critical enablers for smarter cities is to know where people are, how many there are, and how they are shifting as the day goes by. Crowd Vision provides instant, accurate, real time data on pedestrian numbers, densities and flows using standard commercial video cameras and world-leading live video analytics. Its simplicity and versatility mean that it can be deployed widely and cost effectively to provide visibility of crowds at almost any indoor or outdoor location or across a wide city area. It provides the missing link in making urban infrastructures truly smart, enabling live management interventions based on real crowd data, rather than estimates or models.

Crowd Vision is at the heart of a new human and digital ecology and can be applied to a huge range of problems and settings across several customer and market sectors. Contact us to find out more.