Build a People Counting Infrastructure they said
It Will Be Fun they said
What the heck is ElbowRoom??
Have you ever spent a winter at school in upstate NY? The last thing you want to do is leave your room to walk across campus only to find your favorite spot occupied. ElbowRoom began as a class project called StudyView, to address just this problem. It quickly morphed into a tool for business and consumers to know how busy the local coffee shops, study spots and interesting places were. By owning a network of sensors and licensing that data to interested parties, our team thought we would create an infrastucture around real-time access to occupancy counts and environmental data in local spaces. Like a real-time version of Foursquare where no one had to check in. It was 2012, and we thought we were ahead of our time.
Hardware is Hard
Our earliest hardware consisted of a LEGO enclosure and two PIR sensors (basic motion detectors). This method worked but was extremely finnicky & clunky. We quickly graudated to a thermopile array which gave us the ability to see individual heat signatures and path through a doorframe.
But Algorithms Are Harder
The secret sauce of ElbowRoom was our ability to take heat signature data from a doorframe and product live events when individuals entered and exited an area. In order to have a viable business model though, our hardware needed to be cheap, meaning that we had to work off a rather limited 8x8 grid of points to make our judgements. We used a technique called k-means clustering to accomplish this feat.
Pitching, Winning & ROI
Our teamed entered and won 6 of the 8 competitions we entered the company in during that time, more than covering our costs for development. Some of these were hackathon style, weekend long sprints, while others centered around the business plan and my ability to show traction with early adopters and a viable business model. While we didn't quite achieve world domination, we were each able to take a share of the remaining cash to kickstart our lives after college.