Challenge / Goal
The Hugh Lane Gallery is one of Ireland’s most beloved cultural institutions. Located in the North of Dublin’s City Centre, the Gallery is home to an exceptional collection of contemporary and modern Irish art, attracting visitors from every corner of the globe. Admission to the Gallery is free, allowing for widespread enjoyment of the Gallery’s treasures. But with the public good of free access, comes the challenge of quantifying and understanding the volume of visitors and how they experience and enjoy the Gallery.
Solution
The Hugh Lane Gallery, working with Dublin City Council’s Smart City team, set out to identify technological solutions that would provide accurate, non-intrusive analytics, measuring how many visitors attend the gallery and how they move throughout the it. This vital information can assist in exhibition curation; optimising and enhancing the experience of visitors, improving and understanding space utilisation, as well as providing important health and safety information. Working with technology provider Arm, an innovative, privacy-enhanced technology was identified, that gathers and analyses anonymised data from a system of connected cameras within the gallery.
This novel approach visualises and monitors trends and patterns in the use of the gallery. This information is processed “on- the-edge”, meaning processing occurs on the camera device, no video footage is saved or stored in the cloud, changing the model and reducing privacy and security concerns.
A flow of anonymised numerical data representing flows and movement is subsequently visualised through heat maps on a dashboard, which the Gallery management can access. During the entire process, no images of individuals within the line of sight of the cameras are stored.
This dynamic dashboard provides access to information relating to the trends of the gallery. The visualisations of data on the dashboard inform gallery management on how long people tend to stay, how people choose to move around the gallery and give the gallery insight into the demographics of their visitors.
Images
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