For this assignment I plan on measuring the population density of different rooms on campus. Such information would provide us with how crowded certain rooms are during the day and what rooms people tend to prefer at what times. This app also has applications in assisting people trying to find free rooms for studying.
The “machine” for this project would be a pressure plate that is configured at the entrance of a room in front of the door. When people walk into or out of the room, the pressure plate would detect the footstep of the person. The problem then arises as to whether the pressure denotes an ‘enter’ or ‘exit’ movement. Since most people walk with the back of their foot hitting the ground before the front, then the direction of pressure would indicate the type of movement.
This information would then be sent to a computer which would visualize the data. A translucent building schematic with red dots would indicate the presence of people in a room. While we would not know the exact location of these people in the room, we would still know the population density, which is useful for estimating which rooms are crowded at what times. Ultimately this resource can give students and staff an average indication as to when what rooms are free and/or have available working spaces, while also giving us information to multiple questions such as:
- Do people enter alone or in crowds?
- What times of the day are rooms most crowded? Most free?
- How long on average does a person spend in a room?
- Are people making frequent trips out of the room? Are they sitting in place for a long time?
The inspiration for this project was mostly from spy movies where they would use a translucent grid to track people with red dots (The above image is from a video game [Jedi Fallen Order] but has the same premise). The idea sounded really unique, and I wanted to see how well I could emulate this given just a computer and pressure plate.