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Show HN: Density – Anonymous People Counter and API
- deutronium 11y agoDoes this use PIR out of curiosity, or are you using an emitter, receiver in one package.
- jordanmessina 11y agoWe’re using infrared sensors. Both the emitter and detector are on a single sensor, so we only affix our hardware to one side of a doorframe. This is different than break beam which requires hardware on each side of a door.
- deutronium 11y agoGotcha, yeah that makes sense, as it'd cut down the number of individual packages you'd need for the system.
- saosebastiao 11y agoHow much accuracy do you lose when people are dressed up in full winter gear?
- pkelchte 11y agoWhen you would wear metamaterial stealth suits maybe you can avoid being detected by our IR sensors, we're curious as to what you have available!
- thwest 11y agoIncredibly accurate and anonymous seem to be at tension here. A discussion on your signal processing would be illuminating.
- pkelchte 11y agoWe made our own AIR door counter, composed of a few distance sensors. It can tell us in which direction a person is passing, and gives a distance profile that we process to distinguish individual people. Technically, we measure your circumference to some degree, but you might agree that is far from enough to compromise your anonimity.
- thwest 11y agoAIR being active infrared as opposed to passive (or a particular waveband)? Anonymity is a more interesting problem than "can distance sensors uniquely identify a passerby among 500M North Americans" as your reply implies. What if you are the roundest or tiniest person in town? All the sudden you are uniquely identifiable. You're early in development, and I bet whoever did the circumference estimation has more in mind. I imagine you could make a good estimation of a person's height from your data: whether the profile sees knees hips or hands. Can you identify the asymmetric waist bulge of a CHL carrier? Does your infrared band penetrate polyesters but not cotton? I hope the reader's feature-vector blood is flowing at this point. Your page needs to have way more formalization around the concept of anonymity (outside of the registration required area) for me to feel that you are appreciating the problem from an engineering perspective and not a marketing one.
- afar 11y agoFoot traffic should be inexpensive, accurate, and available in real-time. It should be dead simple to integrate with other applications, and it should never invade people's privacy. imo.
- joeyespo 11y agoThis looks awesome! Would love to know ahead of time how crowded my local coffee shop is before I packed up to work there.
- valarauca1 11y agoIf this is the indented use case what purpose the coffee shop have to add one? If in most cases it'll only discourage customer attendance. To be a member of the queue of an establishment can carry some of the social status of that establishment itself. This is a primative notion yes, but fairly ingrained culturally. As businesses often judge their prestige by the length of the queue to enter.
- netfire 11y agoToo long of a queue could discourage customer attendance as well, as people may not want to wait a long time, no matter how prestigious the business is. In addition, a lesser-known business could use lower wait times as a competitive advantage. What really matters, in my opinion, is whether having a long line during certain peak times generates more revenue for the business (by being able to charge more, or by gaining attention due to its long queues) or whether providing a faster and better customer experience with shorter wait times does (and perhaps more customers during non-peak times) Whether one is better than the other may depend completely on your business. Also, I'm not sure this technology forces you to publish your current density information. You could simply use the information for business intelligence gathering and for providing promotions during non-peak times.
- wehadfun 11y agoWhat communications protocol is it using?
- jordanmessina 11y agoWe're using infrared sensors to detect ingresses and egresses from locations.
- valarauca1 11y agoHow does the solution handle multi-ingress/egress points? Could it be used for tracking population leaving during a fire drill? As often this is the first question asked by first responders, "Is anyone still inside?"
- afar 11y agoSo that's a really novel idea. It would be incredible to tell a first responder how many people we think are inside... accurately. We just do installs at each entrance and then normalize.
- escobar 11y agoThis would be a reallly cool application if PIR's were capable of counting "horde" foot traffic, like a giant mass of people streaming out of a door during an alarm. I don't think that something like a PIR could handle that number of people, since it's just the single beam.
- afar 11y agoI really like you, for some reason. I think it's your green handle.
- dmritard96 11y agoThats not a protocol. Is it subgigahertz with Simplicity, or Zigbee or ...etc, etc.
- aniketpant 11y agoI have always wanted to build something like this since I was a kid. The biggest driving thought was to make traffic signals dynamic and build a central communication system for a city's transport. Really glad to see a product coming into the regular consumer space for this :)
- codeshaman 11y ago>> "After adding Density, we saw as much as a 950% increase in site traffic to supported locations. Our users love it." - Darren Buckner, Workfrom CEO When I use google maps, it shows me how busy various roads are and it also chooses the fastest route based on how fluid the traffic is. Seems like google maps is just observing the world and making decisions based on those observations. Now I was wondering, what if all the drivers used google maps at the same time ? Wouldn't it mean that google maps is influencing and even creating the traffic patterns ? Same here - just measuring the 'density' has the effect of actually influencing it which is an interesting outcome and resembles quantum mechanics voodoo stuff :).
- staz 11y agoI thought Google Maps used the Android phone location to know the busy road?
- Xorlev 11y agoAnd anyone actively using maps.
- nikolaj 11y agoI totally had that same thought when using google maps to navigate LA. I wondered what happens when you enter some sort of harmonic oscillation of people trying to evade traffic with alternate routes matching the delay of Google re-routing them. The easy fix would i guess be doing a round-robin of alternate routes..
- tehwebguy 11y agoYeah it seems like at some point you'll end up in a traffic "bubble" where you don't actually get the "fastest" route but the one that thinks will make the roads fastest for everyone.
- Xorlev 11y ago> Wouldn't it mean that google maps is influencing and even creating the traffic patterns ? I'm pretty sure I've observed this in the wild. Occasionally there's a major accident on a freeway in Denver that totally stops traffic. People that know the area well enough hop off the first exit they can and find the most straightforward way over to a major arterial road running in the same direction. Maps sometimes comes up with the theoretically-fastest route that requires lots of turns through neighborhoods, so you'll see a whole conga line of cars piling through suburban streets and congesting the whole area.
- vosper 11y agoBug report: In Firefox, when on this page [1], clicking on the Density logo in the top left takes me to http://www.density.io/undefined http://www.density.io/undefined Looks like you've got a JS issue in there somewhere. [1] http://www.density.io/?ref=hn http://www.density.io/?ref=hn
- jordanmessina 11y agoThank you! Fixing it now.
- darrenbuckner 11y agoGreat product and great team. Congrats everyone!
- nubela 11y agoGorgeous web design, kudos.
- afar 11y agoThanks. Took a long time to get the right balance of imagery, icons, and copy.
- rpcope1 11y agoHow do these talk with the outside world? Do you need to attach them to your own internal WiFi?
- afar 11y agoYeah. Currently we piggy-back on a locations wifi. Relatively low upstream data (37kb / 90secs). We've considered things like Helium. Eventually centralizing the network will be good but for now, wifi's cheap and available.
- tommccabe 11y agoHow does your product compare to existing traffic solutions, like Shoppertrak?
- afar 11y agoCheap and anonymous by design. Also, we're not after big retail. We're after everyone else.
- dhaivatpandya 11y agoFantastic product idea and a landing page that's so good that I figured out what the product does without touching my scroll wheel. I wish however, you'd include a section that provides a reasonable explanation as to why Workroom got a 950% increase in traffic. I'm thinking that if I saw that a place was full, I'd be less likely to head over there. But, if I didn't know, I'd probably give it a whirl. Alternatively, if I've gone there a bunch of times and it's always been full, I just wouldn't go. What exactly is happening?
- crindy 11y agoI think the idea would be that this helps fill dead times. If the place is full, they don't need/want more people showing up just to be turned away. If the place is empty, then they want to advertise that to fill it back up. Also though, I think it was a 950% increase in traffic to the web pages powered by this product, not to the actual locations.
- jordanmessina 11y agoRight, the increase was on the webpages that included Density to show seating capacity.
- sultanofsaltin 11y agoIs that sustained website growth since then? Also can you make that distinction clearer on the site? It's definitely misleading some people.
- escobar 11y agoI also find this particularly confusing/misleading - since you deal mainly with physical locations (often called sites by owners), using the word "site" instead of "web traffic" seems odd. Also, listing a web based metric as large as 950% without any type of time interval really kills the true significance of that metric.
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- robotnoises 11y agoHad no idea what this was. Clicked link. Within one minute I figured out what Density is. Nice job on the landing page! IMO, this is the strongest section: http://www.density.io/#comparison http://www.density.io/#comparison
- afar 11y agoAt one point we went as far as to quiz our moms. "Mom, what does Density do? What does it cost? Do we sell surveillance cameras?" After she got 9/10 correct (she's 58)... she looks at me and says, "Ship it, Andrew. Ship it."
- toomuchtodo 11y ago"Hacker News Tested, Mom Approved".
- lost_my_pwd 11y agoAny plans to offer a "disconnected" version where I could push this data to my own aggregator+API instance? Use case for me would be where foot traffic numbers would itself be sensitive data.
- jordanmessina 11y agoThis isn't in the pipeline but shoot us an email and maybe we can work something out: team@density.io
- sultanofsaltin 11y agoDon't camera systems beat this in pretty much every way? http://www.placemeter.com/ http://www.placemeter.com/ comes to mind. You don't have to resort to infrared sensors in order to provide anonymity, but they do inherently limit you potential accuracy and metrics you can prodive. It all comes down to where the data is processed and what is made available. Also, cheap camera components are coming down fast due to economies of scale, not sure how IR will play out in the long haul.
- daenz 11y agoFrom the landing page: Camera: Real-time, Accurate Break Beam: Anonymous, Accurate Density: Real-time, Anonymous, Accurate, Cheap
- escobar 11y agoYeah, I find that claim particularly amusing since they're just using a single PIR sensor, which is far less accurate than any camera based system. There's no way that you can claim a single PIR beam is as accurate as a camera based system. There's absolutely no information on what they consider "accurate," and anything I can find on older HN threads is very vague and implies that accuracy wasn't their main focus. Here's a basic question I have: can this count a mob of 20 people walking out of store at the same time? If it can't, I believe "accuracy" should have some context, since there are other enterprise systems that do that no problem.
- tonyhb 11y ago> "With Density on a doorframe, we’ll tell you." The landing page advertises this as an entry-level system for doorframes. It doesn't seem that this is made for costco-level swarms of people entering a large space at one time. That said, I also have my doubts on accuracy but the error margin is probably acceptable enough to most.
- Pyfagorass 11y agoMost camera systems wouldn't accurately count the mob of 20 (I work on camera count analytics, and we have to correct for this)
- bgoers 11y ago(some) Kroger chain stores have a similar technology [1] to this to determine how many cashiers are needed at any given time! Neat stuff! [1] http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/kroger-solves-top-customer-issue-long-lines/d/d-id/1141541 http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insig...
- fbr 11y agoLooks great! It could be very nice with public transportation, so I'll be able to know beforehand which wagons are not overcrowded.
- sbuccini 11y agoOur student consulting group, Optimir, worked with Density to test their product around UC Berkeley's campus. It's a fantastic product, and we're really excited to get these installed permanently in libraries, coffeeshops, and weight rooms around campus.
- web007 11y agoPlease don't be too clever for your own good - let me Cmd-Click on the links to open in a new tab. I don't want to be taken away from your page, I want to continue reading more about YOUR product before I go to view your "partner" sites. Same goes for your API, Twitter, etc.
- afar 11y agoWe agree. That was not by design. Updating.
- bryans 11y agoThis is obnoxious website behavior, and I equate it to sites ignorantly disabling right-clicking because they're paranoid someone will steal their photos. If your site contains any links at all, you should never, ever be breaking such basic browser functionality. The only possible legitimate use case would be a webapp which is attempting to create a desktop-style environment, and even then, co-opting the CTRL or ALT keys is likely not the best course of action.
- willlll 11y agoI disable right click on my Website.
- Nadya 11y agoI'll shift+right click all I want on your site. ;)
- icelancer 11y agoFor what reason? This is easily bypassed.
- Nadya 11y agoIf you visit his website [0] it's (at least I hope) intentionally poor designed, everything terrible straight from the late 90's in web design. From marquee, blinking, embedded mp3, and more. There's a built-in bypass in the site.js to allow the context menu if shift is held, though you still get the alert. Or it's just that holding shift allows the context menu to appear after the alert. I don't actually know. document.body.oncontextmenu = function() { alert('Please dont right click!!') return window.event.shiftKey // top secret } [0] bitfission.com
- bliti 11y agoSomething like one of those points rewards cards with rfid and this could allow a merchant to get your purchase data as you enter the premises. Then with other rfid readers throughout the store you can pinpoint where $user spends most time and adjust $coupon for them to incite purchase. Or maybe multiple IR beams like this one in different parts of the store to have traffic metrics on the floor plan. Looks very nice from the design standpoint. It is something that will not register in the mind of the customer. If this interests you: This type of thing can be done at the hobby level. Since this is mostly an IR sensor with wifi connectivity talking to an API and sending mqtt data.
- eli 11y agoThere are already solutions that do this using your phone's wifi: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/19/how-stores-use-your-phones-wifi-to-track-your-shopping-habits/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/1...
- kefka 11y agoOk. So businesses already have cameras. Yeah, privacy, schmiravacy. That horse has done gone left the barn. So, the second problem with cameras/face tracking is cost? I wrote this: https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho It does what your hardware does, but also does facial recognition. It's still early in the build process, but I'm working on a commercial (non-QT) version of this. But right now, it can accurately count unique people, as well as remember people. So when Jane walks in front of the camera, it remembers that her database number is 1234. Tomorrow, it will also remember that she's 1234. And tracking is all stored in few XML config files for easy calculation.
- eevilspock 11y ago> Yeah, privacy, schmiravacy. That horse has done gone left the barn. So you're using the slippery slope as justification and welcome sign instead of warning. The world is all downhill from here exactly because people don't have the integrity and courage to resist. Also
- kefka 11y agoSlippery slope? Humans already can do classification. Should we ban humans from identifying and counting other humans? I can hire 2 guards who can remember people by taking a photo. And then I can have them recall who shows up. With people. All my project does is substitute a computer for human. The only reason why we don't do the above is because people cost a lot more. Computer software and cycles are cheap. And the procedure I used with my code saves a hash of the face. I cannot generate faces from the hash, although it would be a one liner to spool a face to the hard drive when a pic is captured. My software doesn't do that.
- thwest 11y agoYou see, humans have judgement, and obvious presence. I don't mind George and Jim remembering I was at the pub on Tuesday, because they will consider who to reveal that information to before they do. (A pub I don't think anyone would be at if there were two guards photographing everyone). These giant piles of databases are open for everyone.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoThis is pretty awesome. I mentioned doing something like this at the IoT talk I gave, I had read a paper on counting animals by their heat signature for conservation purposes and thought something along those lines would be a simple replacement for the 'walk through the door ring a bell' detectors, and given that a 32bit ARM Cortex-M is about $1.25 you could do that for not much more money than the old light + photocell. Something the paper pointed out was that while the temperature from animal to animal varied, the same animal often kept the same temperature (+/- epsilon) when moving from sensor to sensor and that give some idea of uniqueness. And while I also love kefka's solution I think the face recognition stuff gets a more Orwellian reaction than just tracking heat sources.
- Animats 11y agoThe site is rather vague. They provide the hardware and install it for free, which implies they're selling data to someone else. Who? There's no privacy policy. No terms of service. The "order" button just brings up a blank email. How does the device tell how many people are present based on counting at a doorframe? Is it counting people passing through the door? Does it detect direction? Is it good enough to estimate the number of people inside by subtracting out counts from in counts? Will this work for wide entrances, such as malls? Is this a passive infrared sensor? Those go blind in hot weather. This looks like a cheaper alternative to video counting systems, of which there are many. Video systems get about 98% count accuracy. If you already have surveillance cameras, you can often use them for counting. Beyond that, there's queue measurement - not just how many people are in line, but how many gave up and left without buying.[1] (Seven people in a queue is the tipping point – any longer and most shoppers won’t bother joining it. After 9 minutes, shoppers are likely to give up queuing and leave empty handed (other research says as little 6 minutes). 70% of customers who leave never come back.) [1] http://www.retailsensing.com/queue-management.html http://www.retailsensing.com/queue-management.html
- noxryan 11y agoI was also wondering about its ability to determine the direction of traffic. If it relies on a location having a separate entrance and exit, that's a pretty big negative. I'm also wondering how it handles large groups. Does anyone have any idea how the hardware works?
- escobar 11y agoThere's not much actual information available (this should be concerning), but there have been some clues dropped into past HN threads. This is a picture posted in another HN thread of their "original sensor" which is just 2 basic IR sensors: https://s3.amazonaws.com/screenshots.angel.co/73/340163/7982c9ae0ff6493c904eb57c3e53cab9-original.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/screenshots.angel.co/73/340163/7982... As far as I can tell from the updated website, the new sensor is the same thing, just dressed up nicer. Each sensor is only counting one metric, i.e. ingress. Beyond that, the base hardware (not the sensor) is a Raspberry Pi that connects to both the sensor(s) and WiFi. I'd imagine it would make sense to have many sensors for each box, but maybe not.
- tyho 11y agoWhy does this need to connect to your servers? What happens if you become insolvent? Why can't I just buy the damn thing then use it? Why do I have to pay for a subscription to a service which is effectively a simple proxy between the device and my infrastructure?
- soggypretzels 11y agoThat is my biggest thought. If this is oriented to hackers, let me own the thing so I can do some really cool stuff with it.
- tyho 11y agoI hate this user hostile trend among hardware startups, that is requiring/involving third party "cloud" infrastructure for no particular reason other than to extort money out of customers.
- dotBen 11y agofor no particular reason other than to extort money out of customers Yeah, isn't it terrible that there are companies trying to get money out of customers... :P My comment is tongue-in-cheek but the macro point here is why should a company that invents something or provide a value need to do so in a way that minimizes their profit margin?
- mng2 11y agoThe hardware sounds dead simple, not to mention cheap. The service is the actual product here.
- PascLeRasc 11y agoI don't think the hardware is simple. How would you design something like this? I've thought about this problem for years and no elegant solution has occured until I saw this.
- dtertman 11y agoYour home page freezes my Firefox (33.1 on Mac) :( . Have to pound through five or six unresponsive script warnings. After that, pretty cool idea and nice site!
- afar 11y agoSorry. If you can email team AT density.io with a bug report or something that shows the latency that would be really helpful.
- dtertman 11y agoYour home page freezes my Firefox (33.1 on Mac) :( . Have to pound through five or six unresponsive script warnings. After that, pretty cool idea and nice site!
- lmb 11y agoSoo I thought I had seen this somewhere, just with WiFi used to measure users, turns out it comes straight from the past![0] In the interests of science, why did you switch from WiFi signals to infra-red door counters? Was it that you picked up passersby? (See [1] for previous pitch, which explains it more than the archive.org website) [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140605031145/http://www.density.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140605031145/http://www.densit... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGa9-QUDWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGa9-QUDWo
- Smushman 11y agoI spoke with Andrew over at density.io. His answers regarding can it see the traffic direction (answer - yes for each individual) and how it is powered (custom length power cable, cut at install time for both sensor and base) are inline in this thread. Also Andrew explained the base gathers info from all the sensors for counts. I asked also about people in a group - most doorways are a physical narrowing that automatically places people in single file. If the doorway is wider than that, they can place a sensor on either side (my assumption is that these results are then filtered so a person is not counted 2x).
- watty 11y agoLooks like an awesome product and hardware but the SAAS model sucks (for us). Here's to hoping they release a LAN model for a one time fee.
- talsnet 11y agoLooking forward to hearing more about it when you're ready to share
- ljk 11y agoDoes anyone know why is this product "Show HN" while the other product currently on the front page, Soloshot, only has a product name and slogan?
- jordanmessina 11y agoI did the Show HN. The original title was "Density Platform" because we just revealed our new sensors and the public facing API. Not sure why a mod changed it.
- agotterer 11y agoI have a few questions for the Density folks: - How well does it handle people walking in side by side? - What about someone pushing a cart or stroller? - Can it tell if someone is walking in or out? - How far does the laser reach? Would I need two sensors if I had a double or triple wide door? - I assume these are battery powered? How long do they last?
- vpontis 11y agoThis seems really cool! I can think of a bunch of new things to do with this and a lot of places where I want to know how busy they are. The one thing that really confuses me is the pricing structure. Why do you need to pay each month? Paying $300 for one year of usage seems pretty steep. It's service pricing but it seems like one-time service/purchase.
- vpontis 11y agoThis seems really cool! I can think of a bunch of new things to do with this and a lot of places where I want to know how busy they are. The one thing that really confuses me is the pricing structure. Why do you need to pay each month? Paying $300 for one year of usage seems pretty steep. It's service pricing but it seems like one-time service/purchase.
- downandout 11y agoThis reminds me of Motionloft. Their CEO was an idiot and ran into some legal trouble [1] which hurt the company, but it was backed by Mark Cuban and is still running afaik. I have thought since first learning about Motionloft that this could be a big business but I don't understand why both companies refuse to just sell the hardware. There have to be a ton of companies that would buy it but don't want their very sensitive data about customer counts etc. being transferred to a third party that could be hacked etc. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/01/cuzyolo/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/01/cuzyolo/
- thedogeye 11y agoThere will be a big business putting these on all the entrances of a publicly-traded casino and then tracking activity levels.
- Fudgel 11y agoCould this be done with Apple's iBeacon as well?
- jordanmessina 11y agoIt can! To accomplish this there'd need to be a custom iPhone app for a location and everyone that goes in would have to have the application installed and have their bluetooth turned on.
- inoks 11y agoThere many similar startups over the world: http://sensalytics.net http://sensalytics.net - Deutch project counting people, mobile tracking and cash register data. http://i-counter.ru http://i-counter.ru - Russian projects - uses IR counter with 3G transmission module, so data send directly to web analytics server without additional networking devices.