1. Inspiration
The idea for this project was sparked by a problem our team members noticed in their everyday lives: when going outside for essential actions (e.g. grocery shopping), it was extremely difficult to actually decide what time to go because they had no idea how crowded a location was. Google Maps gave an estimate for restaurants based on past data, but other locations such as public parks and schools didn’t even have an estimate.
As a direct result of this, our team decided to develop CrowdCount to address these concerns. CrowdCount not only includes data on schools and parks, but it also updates a webpage in real-time rather than relying on past data to extrapolate predictions. The real-time aspect makes this more useful for consumers and business owners alike.
2. What it does
CrowdCount is a brand-new project created for the COVID Hackathon II hosted by the Stevens Venture Center. This site utilizes state-of-the-art computer vision to track the number of people entering and exiting an establishment and updates a database in real-time, allowing business owners to get a live feed of how busy their location is. Not only would this enable earlier re-opening for businesses, but it would also create an environment that is safe for owners, workers, and patrons alike. Additionally, CrowdCount offers an easy-to-use, search-based website that allows members of the public to see both real-time and daily average data for crowd sizes at establishments of their choice.
3. How we built it
Our team developed CrowdCount over the course of 9 days, including frontend development with HTML/CSS, backend development with Django, SQLite databases, and our own custom API, and open-source computer vision software using OpenCV. Even though our team members were spread out across the continental U.S., we used collaborative tools such as GitHub and Slack in order to effectively communicate and produce a polished, working product.
4. Challenges we ran into
It goes without saying that the situation the world is in has created a very unique project development experience for everyone. Since our team members were all in different time zones, finding ways to collaborate in real-time was a big challenge. In regards to technical challenges, the greatest difficulty was just the fact that we were working with new tools. This meant a lot of time was spent correcting our own mistakes because we were unfamiliar with syntax or style. In particular, creating a fully functioning search bar that accessed and searched through a database was a big technical hurdle we overcame.
5. Accomplishments we're proud of
We’re very proud of the end product that we’ve created and all the learning that took place throughout the development process, but the thing that really stands out to us is how well our team members collaborated despite the big separation between us all. Since our team members were all in different time zones, communication was a difficult task for all of us — we had to be very careful not to accidentally change someone else’s work or to forget to mention a necessary detail. This is easier said than done, but our team managed to avoid any of these problems, and we’re extremely proud of this fact.
6. What we've learned
Going into this project, we wanted to challenge ourselves to learn to work with new tools we haven't had much exposure to. Our team members have varying levels of technical proficiency, so each member learned different skills through creating CrowdCount. Through this project, one member learned the fundamentals of front-end web design (i.e. using HTML, CSS, and Javascript), another got to familiarize himself with computer vision concepts, and someone even got to learn simple things such as how to work with GitHub.
7. What's next for this project
Though we're extremely proud of the work we've done, we understand that CrowdCount, in its current state, is only the beginning of adjusting to life post-COVID-19. For the future, we hope to make our website more interactive and include robust visualizations of our data in order to provide even more to the public. Additionally, we hope to create a weekly reporting system that we can provide to businesses so that they can track changes in their crowd size over time and plan for days of the week that are busier on average.
Additionally, we hope to begin integrating CrowdCount into our daily lives. One important area of us students’ lives that we feel that CrowdCount can specifically impact is university buildings — if universities can carefully monitor the number of people in a lecture hall or library, they will be more confident in their ability to protect students from COVID-19 and can accelerate the timeline of students returning to campus and receiving a high-quality education.
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