VenuesNow (06/25/20) Zoltak, James

The Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) will use Armored Things' crowd intelligence software system at its 22,000-seat Banc of California Stadium to keep fans and operations personnel safe for the forthcoming return of Major League Soccer. The system employs existing cameras, Wi-Fi and other data inputs, and Armored Things CEO Julie Johnson Roberts said the coroanvirus pandemic highlighted the technology's potential to help with reopening. "When you think about crowd intelligence there are other elements that you need to focus on as well, so we are starting to pull that together now," said LAFC/Banc of California Stadium Chief Technology Officer Christian Lau. He and Roberts said using existing infrastructure makes the system less costly to implement, while privacy issues are addressed because the data collected is not used to identify individuals, but track movements of people within a venue. The collected data is visually mapped using artificial intelligence software deployed in command centers and on mobile devices, allowing operations staff to make adjustments related to crowd density, space utilization, concessions sales, sanitation and security. "You could imagine in real time being able to tell, you have a hot spot in a certain portion of the venue, we can translate that into, 'Hey this concourse is getting over-crowded,'" Roberts said. "We can deliver that via text message to someone who's tasked with responding, provide an incident management tool on the mobile app as they are walking through the venue."

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