Entrance Flow Management

Digital signage at the primary and – if they exist – one or more secondary store entrances indicate to shoppers whether, and how many, people may enter. Recording the entry and exit of visitors is performed either manually or through the use of a third-party automated person counting solution. For the manual approach, a store employee – the Entry Monitor – can use either a handheld clicker or a webpage accessible on a personal mobile device to indicate whether someone has entered or left. For an automated approach, Nexmosphere presence sensors placed at entrance and exit doors are used to track visits. Regardless of the approach, the Intuiface sample keeps a dynamic record of the number of current visitors and, based on a real-time comparison to the store’s capacity, displays either an Enter or Wait message.

The goal of this experience is to illustrate how one can easily create a people counting and flow management solution in Intuiface. It is comprised of two experiences:

• Main (mandatory): Keeps track of visitor count. Performs comparison of visitor count to store capacity. Displays Enter / Wait messaging based on the comparison results. Includes additional messaging to reinforce good social and health practices.
• Additional Displays (optional): Mirrors the messaging displayed by the Main experience.

Both manual and automated approaches are possible for tracking each entry and exit.

For the manual approach, two methods are provided:

1. Keyboard events generated by a handheld clicker, like the device used to remotely control a PowerPoint presentation. The Main experience looks for specific keyboard events – e.g., Page Up and Page Down – and responds to those events by incrementing or decrementing the visitor count.
2. Web triggers used to translate button presses on a webpage into increment/decrement actions in the experience. A simple webpage is published and available for use.

For an automated approach, any automated third-party people counting solution can be used as long as the count can be communicated to the Main experience using Web APIs, web triggers, or other communication methods supported by Intuiface. To illustrate an automated approach, one of the reference designs uses Nexmosphere presence sensors to communicate the entry or exit (at different doors) of facility visitors.

Both the manual and automated reference design experiences have accompanying Help Center articles:

• details about the manual approach using a handheld counter and web triggers.
• details about the automated approach using Nexmosphere