The PMY Pulse - LiDAR-Measurement for Integrated Crowd Management at Live Events
INTEGRATED CROWD MANAGEMENT
Live events, whether in a public space or a dedicated stadium or arena, present unique crowd management challenges.
While airports and train stations may handle similar numbers of people, they have the advantage of spreading guests out across larger areas, and in a more predictable fashion.
At live events, there’s a combination of unpredictability, and huge crowds making operations, customer experience and security a challenge.
Meeting that challenge requires an integrated approach across every aspect of the event experience, supported by real-time measurement of what’s happening on the ground.
Teams like merchandise, F&B, sponsorships, hospitality, and security often work independently on their functions, but at some point, all these individual elements should contribute to a broader strategy for crowd management.
Not only can merchandise stores, concessions, and hospitality areas become choke points and crowd problems, they can also be used as tools to help alleviate crowding. When a patron is shopping or getting a drink, they aren’t packed into a concert venue or an experience.
When a fan is standing in line to enter a location, they aren’t enjoying the experience of waiting and they’re not spending any money.
One of the reasons airports care about queues is becuase the more time a traveller spends in a queue, the less time and money they’ll spend in the landside retail and F&B. Ideally, every part of a location pulls its weight to help manage crowds, to keeping patrons safely distributed, to increase revenue, and to enhance the experience for everyone.
How do you manage queues and how do you know when and where you have problems?
That answer is people measurement!
Accurate measurement of crowding, occupancy, wait times, and patron journeys is essential for effective integrated crowd management. It provides the real-time insights needed to adjust strategies on the fly, while also delivering the data required to inform better design, layout, and operational planning for future events.
In this white-paper, we’ll cover the key elements of people-measurement for live events including the technologies that can help you understand where people are and what they are doing. We’ll focus particularly on LiDAR and explain why it’s the backbone of most live-event measurement systems (but why it can’t do everything you need).
Finally, we’ll delve into the information you get from that measurement and how it can be used to solve specific problems in crowd-management and event customer experience.
PEOPLE MEASUREMENT FOUNDATION - WHY LiDAR?
LiDAR is the sensor we use most commonly for live events and sporting venues.
It’s a great, general-purpose sensor with few weaknesses and a host of strengths. No technology currently on the market is better at providing high-quality people measurement data.
LiDAR provides outstanding accuracy: typically identifying and accurately counting 99% or better, of the people in a location. It provides extraordinary geographic precision: LiDAR is nearly perfect in mapping the location of each identified object in the space. Because
LiDAR creates a true 3D view of a space, it doesn’t have to the geo-spatial inferencing necessary with cameras – making LiDAR data much less error prone.
Finally, LiDAR provides excellent continuous tracking of objects. Due to its 3-dimensional view it can track objects from frame to frame.
High quality people identification, location accuracy, and continuous tracking are the pillars of accurate people measurement and LiDAR is best-in-class at all three.
When it comes to live events and sporting venues, several additional aspects of LiDAR sensors also stand out.
First, LiDAR sensors provide excellent area coverage per sensor. A LiDAR sensor can provide detailed crowd tracking on areas far larger than a CCTV camera. When new hardware is required, that means fewer sensors are necessary with commensurate savings in the time and effort for implementation. And because stadiums and live events are typically large, LiDAR’s coverage advantage is often a decisive factor in making the technology choice.
Similarly, LiDAR provides an unusual degree of environmental flexibility. Because it generates its own infrared light beams, LiDAR isn’t troubled by lighting conditions. It works just as well at night as it does in the full sun. Glare, shadows, and all the strange artifacts of light that tend to confuse cameras just don’t matter when using LiDAR.
For stadiums, this means LiDAR can provide tracking in poorly lit concourse areas, parking areas, and areas that move from full sun to shadow to the glare of lights without any performance degradation. This is even more important in live events where crowds are often in or moving through areas with very poor lighting. It also makes LiDAR a great tool for supplementing camera in security applications combined with crowd management.
Another benefit of LiDAR sensors is the flexibility they provide in mounting location. Because of LiDAR’s excellent range, it can be mounted almost anywhere relative to a scene. If you’ve struggled to find mounting locations for CCTV cameras in open areas or locations with atriums or high ceilings, you’ll appreciate the flexibility LiDAR brings. It doesn’t need a top-down view, and you can mount it well away from a scene and still get excellent measurement performance.
It’s also very easy to fuse LiDAR sensors into a single image and you don’t need precise mounting locations to accomplish that fusion. If the easiest mounting point for a sensor is 5 meters from your ideal spot, chances are it won’t make much difference to the measurement. We often have to bring up LiDAR sensors the day before a live-event and get measurement flowing in less than 24 hours. That’s very difficult to do with CCTV where custom ML models need to be deployed but it’s relatively easy with LiDAR sensors.
Finally, we really appreciate LiDAR’s simple and compelling privacy story. Because LiDAR is a radar-like image, it doesn’t create ANY personally identifiable tracking information. It doesn’t know who anyone is. It doesn’t capture gender or age or race. It’s a remarkably clean measurement solution that can be comfortably deployed anywhere in the world without legal complications or privacy risk.
LiDAR is an exceptional technical solution for most crowd management applications. Historically, the primary drawback has been cost — LiDAR sensors were significantly more expensive than other measurement technologies. However, that barrier has diminished considerably. Over the past year, sensor prices have dropped substantially, driven largely by advances in industrial and automotive sectors. As adoption continues to grow across those industries, we expect LiDAR pricing to remain on a downward trend, making it an increasingly cost-effective option relative to alternative technologies.
So, why don’t we always just use LiDAR sensor?
There are still some use-cases where LiDAR doesn’t shine. On a cost-efficiency basis, it’s still worse than stereoscopic camera for accurate In-Out counting of small entrances and it usually still lags existing CCTV cameras for counting larger entrances. If you need demographic meta data (age, gender), it can’t do that either.
Finally, LiDAR doesn’t do well in measuring packed areas of unmoving people. Think of grandstands, packed front of stage concert areas, or open, grassy seating areas. In all these cases, camera is a better performer.
Why? It’s more a software than a technology problem, but LiDAR software systems right now aren’t optimised for separating out densely packed, unmoving people.
Camera ML, which is often trained to identify head/shoulders just works better right now in this use-case.
UNDERSTANDING THE DATA
People-Measurement and Crowd Management platforms generate dozens of different metrics.
The description of individual fan journeys is particularly rich and complex.
However, you don’t need to go deep into the data to understand the basics from a crowd-management perspective.
Core Metrics in Crowd Management
Measurement starts with understanding how many people are in a space — occupancy.
After occupancy, the two most widely used metrics are:
Throughput
A measure of how many people have passed through an area or process.
Applied to restrooms or lounges: a measure of usage.
Applied to entries or concession lines: a measure of efficiency.
Wait Time
Typically applied to queues, but can also be used for many other processes — e.g., time between ordering and food pickup.
Finally, there are a host of metrics that can be applied to individual fan journeys.
This is by far the most complex form of measurement, especially when it comes to merchandise sales, which is a complex topic on its own.
The most common and probably most important journey metric is Dwell Time:
Captures how long fans spend in an area or activity.
It's important and interesting in almost every crowd management implementation.
The Two Methods of Measuring Occupancy
Knowing how many people are in an event or area is the most common requirement for effective crowd management.
In one sense, it’s very straightforward — it’s just a count of how many people are in the defined area.
1. Direct Counting
When you can just count people, that’s almost always the best option.
It’s accurate and simple.
But counting everyone in a space isn’t always possible, especially in large and complex venues.
Challenges with direct counting:
Large venues like arenas have:
Public and non-public areas
Complex layouts
Areas that are expensive or difficult to measure
Some spaces (e.g., outdoor food courts with umbrellas) can’t be reliably measured because:
People-measurement technologies rely on clear lines of sight
If that’s blocked, cameras and LiDAR won’t work well.
2. In-Out Counting (Derived Occupancy)
Whenever direct counting isn’t possible, the fallback is usually In-Out counting.
How it works:
If you know how many people went into a space and how many came out, you know how many are still there.
As simple as that sounds, it’s important to understand the limitations of In-Out counting.
Key Limitations:
In larger, more complex facilities, there will often be:
Leakage points
Counting issues
For example:
Staff may use public entrances
VIPs may enter or exit through non-standard routes
These factors can significantly alter occupancy numbers
Even if there’s no leakage and counting is very accurate, errors can build up over time due to volume.
Example:
Accuracy: 99% (a typical rate for In-Out people-counting tech)
Volume: 20,000 people enter and exit over a day
Error: 1% = potentially 200 more exits than entries (or vice versa)
That’s still great measurement, but:
When a facilities manager sees a -200 or +200 occupancy error at the end of the day — especially when a stadium looks empty — it can raise eyebrows.
How to Use Occupancy Data Effectively
It’s important to know what the measurement is for:
If you need true occupancy for emergency response → In-Out counting is insufficient
If you need to track occupancy trends over time for staffing or operations → In-Out counting works well
Also, remember:
Error rates aren't necessarily random.
Most technologies see errors increase under stress — e.g., during large ingress/egress periods
A Practical Hybrid Approach: Ticket Scans + People Measurement
To minimise error, many venues combine data sources:
Use ticket scans for the In-Count
Use people measurement for the Out-Count
Why this works:
Ticket scans prevent staff and volunteers from being counted, regardless of their entry method
Exit counts are usually more accurate, especially near event close
This approach gives nearly perfect occupancy numbers throughout most of the event
Throughput
Throughput is a great metric of both usage and process efficiency. If you’re thinking about use-cases like dynamic maintenance, your main interest is in the continuous tracking of how many people have used something – be it a luxury lounge or a restroom. Throughput is a count of usage, but crowd management solutions will let you fine-tune it in a variety of ways including resetting it at certain times or after certain events. With a restroom, for example, you’re primarily interested in how many people have used it SINCE the last cleaning. Being able to tie resets of the metric to the cleaning event becomes critical in that scenario.
For process measurement, throughput is generally used as a per-time metric. For ticket scanning, concession checkout, meals-served, and other similar processes, measuring how many fans were able to finish or navigate the process is a powerful measure of efficiency. In some cases, you can even use measures of throughput to gamify performance, measure individuals or teams, or A/B test alternative processing strategies or technologies.
Time
While throughput is a great measure of efficiency, it doesn’t always measure how well the process is working from a fan perspective.
It may take very little time to scan a ticket, but if there’s only one scanner and a thousand people just arrived by train, even great throughput isn’t going to make the experience pleasant.
For most processes, wait time is the best metric for understanding the fan perspective. It captures the actual experience – how long a fan had to stand in line, wait for food, or wait for an elevator.
With people measurement, you can measure actual wait times because you can track exactly how long each person spent in a queue or before they could leave with food.
A lot of times, though, you need to understand Predicted Wait Time – how long the person just stepping into the line will have to wait.
Predicted Wait Time is what you need to manage lines effectively. It tells you when adding processing stations/people is necessary or when staff can be re-allocated to other tasks. While there are a variety of ways to calculate Wait Time, the most common is to track the number of processing stations, the average throughput (there are a lot of variations on how to do this best), and the number of people in line. Put simply, if you have 2 processing stations and it takes 1 minute to process a station, then a line of 10 people will take 5 minutes for the next person.
Congestion/Density
During an event, one of the most common questions/concerns is simple: what’s too crowded?
Occupancy provides a kind of answer to that question, but it’s far from complete. If I told you there are 500 people in the Experience Zone, you’d know the number of people but not whether it’s crowded.
Is the Experience Zone the size of a football field or a small cafeteria? Deriving crowd density turns out to be trivial in OPTIC, however, because OPTIC maintains a digital map of the location. It always knows exactly how large any area is. Dividing the Occupancy by the Area yields the number of people per square metre.
In smaller or well-defined areas, a Crowd Density metric is all you really need to answer the question “what’s too crowded”.
For larger areas, though, the sub-areas that may get too crowded aren’t always definable or mappable. To handle that, you need a congestion metric.
The congestion metric finds the most crowded sub-area within a space and provides the population density for that sub-area.
Journey
People measurement technologies don’t just count how many people are in a location, they can track each individual’s movement across the space.
LiDAR is particularly good at this – in many respects it’s what its optimised to do since it’s creating a 3D map of the space 10 times a second.
When you track the movement of people (or vehicles or any other object), you create a kind of journey map over time. It has a starting point, an ending point, and a duration. But it also encompasses a lot of information about what happened in-between.
Journey metrics encapsulate everything from the path a fan took to get from one place to another to how much time they spent at any given location or place along their journey. Journey metrics even capture how fast the person moved at any given point.
All of this information can be useful and interesting, but the most commonly used and important journey metric is how long a fan spent in a given location (dwell-time) – often converted into a metric of engagement by specifying a minimum time value (say 2 minutes) and then counting how many people spent at least that amount of time in the location.
KEY USE CASES
Metrics are the foundational elements for using people measurement to do integrated crowd management.
Metrics provide insight into what’s happening right now at a venue, what happened over time, and how people are crowds are behaving. They open a range of real-world use-cases spanning the needs of event organisers, stadium/arena managers, F&B operators, merchandising professionals, and security teams.
This wide-range of stakeholders highlights the integrated nature of crowd management. It isn’t just about managing queues or occupancy; it’s about optimising experience and revenue and removing risk. An optimised crowd management system will involve teams from across the organisation balancing priorities to maximise broad organisational goals.
Take a seemingly simple case – how many tickets to sell to a live event? The more tickets you sell the higher your gate revenue. But at some level, an event will begin to see diminishing returns and increased risks across a whole range of dimensions.
Parts of the location will become over-crowded and turn into chokepoints. That degrades the experience and lowers attendee satisfaction.
Lines at experiences, F&B and merch may grow too long, reducing average spend per person while causing absolute declines in total revenue as opposed to gate.
Security concerns will grow and high-risk situations like crowd-crush may emerge.
The answer to how many tickets to sell isn’t simple and it isn’t “as many as you can or are allowed to”.
The goal is always to create an optimal balance of crowd to location, so that every part of the location is well-used, every part of the fan experience is smooth. This may seem like a “soft” goal, but the smoother the fan journey, the more engaged they will be and the more money and time they will invest in the experience. There are many reasons to do integrated crowd management including safety, risk reduction and fan satisfaction. But good crowd management also delivers real, measurable ROI.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important and common use cases for live events.
Ingress/Egress Management
People dislike standing in line. Line times are a huge driver of negative customer satisfaction. And that dissatisfaction, especially when ingressing, translates into less time, less engagement and less spend.
The time between ingress and event start is hugely important in driving incremental fan revenue. The more time you give fans, the more incremental revenue you can generate.
Every minute you save fans in line time will translate into additional F&B and merch revenue – making better queue management one of the highest ROI opportunities in crowd management. It’s also a perfect illustration of how integrated crowd management is.
Ingress queues drive merch and F&B performance, and operational improvements in a seemingly unrelated area can make everyone look good.
Total Occupancy, Capacity Planning, and Intra-day Ticket Sales
For stadiums and arenas, ticket sales are constrained by seats. You can sell out, but you can’t do more than sell out.
For festivals, fairs, and other complex live events, the constraints are less clear.
Many fairs simply sell all the tickets they can. When your kids have to wait 50 minutes to ride on the kiddie coaster, you know how this feels.
For most large-scale events (music festivals, golf or tennis tournaments, etc.), the number of tickets that can be sold is fixed as part of a public license for the event. If that’s the case, there are two ways that better measurement and integrated crowd management can drive massive ROI.
The first is raising your capacity by giving you the ability to document your consistent ability to handle the crowd’s you’ve had. If you can establish that the venue is managing X thousands of people quite well, you can usually get Y additional thousands approved.
Of course, that also implies you’ve actually done the work to manage those crowds well and are measuring all of the critical areas.
Second, if you’re measuring site occupancy in real-time, you have an opportunity to open up additional intra-day tickets. For longer events, you’ll always have a significant group of people who leave much earlier. That means your event is always under-capacity. Whether you’re boosting your max capacity or selling intra-day tickets, the ROI from this use-case in crowd management is enormous.
Sponsorship and Partner relationship optimisation
Live events bring opportunities for brands to connect directly with customers in ways that are far more impactful than with traditional advertising or social media.
So, it’s no surprise that sponsorship opportunities and brand-centred experiences have become an important part of many live-events. Whether it’s gameday at an arena, a chance to connect with VIPs at a tournament, or a hang-out for influencers at a festival, sponsorships are a unique and growing part of the live experience.
But like any other form of marketing, showing impact is both crucial and challenging. Effective crowd management can help you drive audience to those experiences, but it can also be the measurement vehicle for their effectiveness. You can tell brands how many eyeballs they got, their total minutes of engagement, how successful they were in capturing eyeballs and turning them into dwells, and how they stack up against other experiences.
For experiences, you can even provide brand sponsors details about where patrons spent their time – what worked and what didn’t. Packaging measurement with every sponsorship is a huge differentiating factor – not only in driving first time sponsorships, but in helping your sponsor’s media planners make the case to come back again and again.
Key Area Flow Management
Every event and arena has a few key areas that serve as both collection and distribution points for crowds. It’s almost impossible (and probably undesirable) to try and create an experience that doesn’t have these key flow areas.
There are incredibly high-value areas because nearly every patron at an event will flow into and through them. They are also uniquely challenging because a core part of their purpose is just that – flow. If a key area doesn’t facilitate flow effectively, it can become a huge issue. And if it doesn’t make it easy for people to get where they want to go, it can become a source of frustration while reducing the amount of time patrons have to enjoy, eat or shop.
Measurement of flow areas can help achieve the right balance between space utilisation and flow. By understanding how patrons flow through the area and how that flow changes by and during events, you can design experiential strategies that maximise the space usage without impacting its functional purposes.
Merch Store Optimisation
Few areas provide as many opportunities for improvement and significant ROI as merch optimisation. For both stadiums and events, merch is a major source of incremental revenue.
Customer shopping is probably the highest value per minute of the on-location experience. Yet this shopping occurs within a remarkably challenging retail environment.
Gameday and event merch stores get SLAMMED. The density of shoppers is often an order of magnitude higher than in even the busiest traditional retailers. This puts a premium on layout, on crowd management, and on effective merchandising and queueing.
Every part of the experience needs to work in tandem to make the shopping experience effective given the crowd densities the store must handle. This is a place where people measurement achieves its highest resolution – we typically measure every single shopper in a store, twice a second, down the exact square foot they are standing on. You should know – quite literally – every single step a shopper took if you want to maximise your retail opportunities.
VIP and Premium Experiences
Your most valuable fans drive a disproportionate share of event revenue. That’s why creating premium experiences has become a core part of every venue and live event.
A segment of the fanbase is willing and able to maximise their spend to ensure the best possible experience. Which is great. Except it means you must deliver a truly great experience.
That can be an exercise in crowd or space management (ensuring that people have the best and least crowded views of an event), facility management (luxury boxes and hospitality), CRM integration (making sure access to everything is optimised), and personalisation (everything from concierge services to basic recognition at key points).
Building out great premium experiences isn’t JUST an exercise in integrated crowd management, but it almost always includes that. You need to be able to understand individual customer value, identify who and where premium customers are, and you need to be able to deliver the core aspects of your premium experience to them in real-time.
F&B Queue and Seating Optimisation
For both stadiums and live events, F&B is a pain-point and a huge revenue driver.
The pain part comes from the inherent challenges of delivering quality food in a time and space constrained environment.
People aren’t there to eat & drink (at least not primarily), so the rhythm of food-service will always be set by the nature and timing of the event. There is no way to avoid crowds and congestion at half-time. Yet so much of the success of F&B depends on finding ways to extend the range and timing what patrons do while maximising operational efficiency.
From queue management, virtual queuing, proper line design, better flow around concessions, proper waiting and seating options, integrated wait time displays, and even personalized offers and concierge services, a measurement-driven and fully integrated approach to F&B optimization can drive massive improvement.
Parking Flow Optimisation
Parking isn’t the black-box it used to be. Good parking systems provide integrated information about reservations, movements, and payments at every gate. You may also get license plate data allowing you track repeats and you may be able to create broader customer journeys by combining parking reservations to ticketing systems to understand if visitors are parking in optimal locations (and potentially help them to do so).
You may be able to use the parking data you have to understand direction of arrival and ingressing flows. You can use this data to maximise flow from lot to entrance to seat by effectively integrating dynamic signage into the customer journey, helping steer each new arrival to the best and fastest entrance.
Curbside & Traffic Egress Management & Control
Management of pick-up and drop-off zones, rideshare areas, and the flow of passengers around event adjacent streets is a huge concern for large live events. Not only can a poor egress experience ruin an otherwise great day, safety problems abound, and street disruptions can become a source of significant community resentment.
One of the unique features of LiDAR-based flow measurement is that it effectively captures and classifies all the moving objects in its field of view including vehicles as well as people. And since it is an indoor/outdoor, any lighting technology, it can be used to solve some of the most painful problems with crowd management on egress.
Common use-cases include real-time monitoring of key drop-off and rideshare areas, dynamic allocation of staff when necessary to manage situations, safety and near-miss alerting, and monitoring of traffic and pedestrian flows to test & optimise different traffic control strategies.
SUMMARY
The goal of integrated crowd management is to use every part of the location and every tool at your disposal to maximise the live experience for every patron. To do that well takes continuous effort and continuous measurement. It’s the beauty and challenge of live events that they are never just the same old thing. And no matter how good you’ve gotten at optimising patron experience, the size and complexity of crowds at live events will always be a challenge.
Effective measurement is at the foundation of any serious effort to do crowd management well. You need to know where you have problems, and you need to be able to measure whether changes have made a difference. In a complex live environment, you can’t expect to put eyes on every part of the venue every minute it’s happening. Nor can you track the individual journeys of patrons as they navigate the experience. Time spent in lines, searching for amenities, or navigating the concourse is often lost, along with the satisfaction, engagement, and spending it could have generated.
Because effective measurement requires investment in measurement infrastructure (even if you are re-purposing existing CCTV equipment, you’ll need new processing capabilities), a measurement system needs to be scaled to the granularity required for each use case and area within the location. The sensors and techniques you’ll use for understanding total event occupancy are quite different than what you need to understand the fine-grained behaviors of shoppers in your flagship merch store or the wait times in an unstructured queue.
Across most complex venues, we recommend using a mix of the most cost-effective technologies. That usually means existing or new CTTV cameras for In-Out counting at major entrances and for understanding real-time occupancy in grandstands or large sitting areas. For most other spaces, including outside traffic management, concessions & food areas, key flow areas, and high-value areas like Hospitality and Merch, we recommend LiDAR sensors.
Finally, we recommend supplementary electronic tracking for specialised use-cases like wayfinding apps and asset management. Measurement should always be geared toward the use-case and value of the area within the location.
Implementing this measurement will ensure that your operational and planning teams have the data they need to monitor event conditions in real-time, instantly recognise when pre-event expectations aren’t being met, and adjust and balance on the fly. Some of the key metrics you can expect to track include real-time occupancy for the entire venue and for every designated sub-area, usage for areas where you want to do dynamic maintenance, throughput to monitor process efficiency, queue lengths and wait times to understand the fan experience at both ingress and F&B and Merch Cashwrap, and dwell time for areas where you want a deeper dive into fan behavior.
While all of these (and many additional) metrics are available in real-time, they are also collected and available for historical analysis. Effective crowd management is a process that begins with your pre-event planning where you should be establishing threshold expectations and crowd management goals. Those thresholds and goals help drive real-time monitoring, and they sharpen post-event analysis. After every event, it’s worth reviewing not only how/where event crowds didn’t perform as expected (whether that’s poor conversion rates in merch, long lines in F&B, or overcrowding in flow areas), but how and why that happened. Integrated crowd management analytics will give you the data you need (including full forensic replay of crowd behavior) to understand exactly what went wrong.
Without that understanding, you’ll never get better. But understanding alone doesn’t drive improvement. Your operational teams must commit to working together to explore potential solutions or improvements across all of the many use-cases wrapped up in crowd management.
The good news – not only do crowd management use-cases target many of the primary drivers of attendee dissatisfaction, they drive significant ROI. Everyone thinks of reduced line-times as primarily a matter of visitor satisfaction, but the less time patrons waste in lines, the more of the experience they will engage with and the more they are likely to spend. Integrated crowd management approaches recognise the importance of understanding both the whole of the customer journey and the full array of venue and communication tools that might influence that journey.
Best of all, when you try new approaches or potential solutions to crowd management issues, you’ll be getting the measurement you need to decide if they work or not. Given the enormous complexity of large-scale live events and their ever-changing nature, a process of continuous improvement driven by measurement is the only path to delivering truly world class event experiences and optimising every aspect of the event experience.