"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." — Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (1962)
Open Area
In 2017, we had a customer tell us she spent $700,000 every year for each building in a 4 million square foot office portfolio. $700,000 bought her human consultants who would visit her offices and do 7-day observational studies of how busy different spaces were (once per quarter).
As it turns out, she was not alone. Over the years, hundreds of customers have asked if they could use the infrared technology in our Entry sensors for open space detection (to measure desk availability, lounge use, how people use an amenity, and so on). Our answer has always had to be, no.
Not yet, anyway.
Since then we have been thinking about and working to solve the thorny problem of counting people in unbounded space and making it affordable to scale to tens of thousands of business and hundreds of millions of square feet.
Today, we're proud to introduce the latest addition to our platform — Open Area™ by Density.
Technical Leaps
Once, every few years, you get a glimpse of the future and how it might work. The famous ones are well known: the internet growing at 2,300%, Englebart's mother of all demos, Steve's visit to Xerox PARC.
The importance of a novel observation or technical leap is obvious in retrospect but it's easy to disregard in the moment: hypertext, vaccines, the cambered wing, luggage with wheels, even the steam engine was not of any immediate consequence. It often takes decades even centuries of maturing before any given innovation's future is assured. But every now and then, if you squint, you sometimes get a chance to make out the rough profile of the future.
This is what we saw:
The Power of Radar
Open Area™ leverages a radar system of our own design.
Each dot is a depth value generated from thousands of small movements in three-dimensional space. We use these clustered data points to count people and observe movement anonymously.
The technology fits in the palm of your hand, is unaffected by sunlight or reflectivity, and mounts in minutes. It is more accurate than a camera, anonymous at source, and made in America.
Features and Benefits
Open Area™ comes with a suite of applications that leverages its unique aerial dataset:
- Time occupied — See how long, on average, a space is used for
- Desk and room availability — Let employees make decisions about space in real-time
- Cost-savings — 60% reduction in deployment costs (vs. camera/optical alternatives)
- Heatmaps — Track foot traffic patterns to measure the effectiveness of current space designs (coming soon)
One more thing ...
In the process of exploring the unique capabilities of Open Area™, we realized something novel – a way of looking at people in space we'd never seen before.
Synchronize your floorplan and turn on Density Live. It will feel like a fragment of the future.
You can send us an email to learn more – sales@density.io.
We can't wait to see what you do with the tech.
Andrew, Density CEO