Dear friends in museum geekitude, We're looking for a solution for our small museum to count people. Specifically, we have an increasing number of free days, and we'd really prefer for our limited staff and volunteers to spend their time interacting with visitors instead of focusing on getting a good count. That said, we'd like a good count.
We have three wide entrances and on our busy nights, thousands of people will stream in. My early investigation has uncovered cheap IR systems that don't do well with multiple people walking through the same doorway together, or expensive video systems that seem like overkill as they do all kinds of non-counting functions. I talked to an engineer friend about us hacking together an IR system with two distance sensors for each doorway pointing out at an angle to be able to sense two/three people at a time, and we might pursue that, but he strongly suggested I first reach out to brilliant people in the field and see how you deal with this. How do you deal with this? Thanks! Nina
