Just a short post to direct your attention to a Feb. 18 New York Times story (registration and/or subscription may be required) “At Newark Airport, the Lights Are On, and They’re Watching You,” which outlines how networked arrays of LED light fixtures, sensors and video cameras are being used by airports, municipalities and shopping centers to monitor crowd levels, automobile and pedestrian traffic and, eventually, whether garbage cans are getting too full.
Of particular interest was this passage:
“The system could, once software is developed, also make shopping more convenient — a potential boon for malls losing business to the Internet. Sensing a shopper pulling into a parking lot, the system could send an alert to a smartphone, showing empty spaces, or a coupon.”
That same approach could also be used to recruit shoppers to participate in marketing research studies, though, as the article touches on, there would understandably be privacy and Big Brother-type questions to be sorted out. But as long as the potential respondents have opted in to the research process and thus are not caught by surprise when a survey invite pops up on their phone, this kind of location-specific technology may add another worthwhile wrinkle to mobile and other types of in-the-moment research.