Using Live Data

Occuspace provides live, real-time Occupancy data for your spaces in a number of flexible ways, enabling different use cases around optimizing space management and operations processes as well as improving the visitor experience. Below are a few examples of what our customers have achieved using our live data.

• Higher education customers use live occupancy data to report the busyness levels of their public spaces (libraries, dining halls, restaurants, recreational facilities, etc.) to their students via websites and mobile apps, allowing these students to better react to conditions and plan their day

• A large tech company uses live data to understand building occupancy in real-time, allowing them to optimize food service operations, reduce waste, improve staffing, and ensure a strong employee experience for their on-site workforce

• A major ski resort uses Occuspace to provide real-time information to their skiers (via a mobile app, their Website, and digital signage) around ski lift waiting times and restaurant/dining room busyness

Live data is accessible 24x7x365 via the Occuspace Portal and the Customer API, and through the Digital Signage and Waitz products, and customizable to reflect changing Hours to account for Holidays, staffing changes, or other customer-specific events.

Live Data Attributes

Each live data data point reported by Occuspace has the following attributes that can be provided across the various access methods:

• Count - The number of people in the space at the current moment in time

• Capacity - The overall capacity of the space

• Percent Occupied - The percent occupied the space is at the current time based on the Count and Capacity numbers

• Busyness Level - A textual representation of the busyness level of a space based on the Percent Occupied value, and used in externally facing functionality such as Digital Signage and the Waitz service. The following are the three possible text values that appear and their corresponding data ranges:

  • "Very busy" - Percent occupied > 80%

  • "Busy" - Percent occupied > 45% and <= 80%

  • "Not busy" - Percent occupied <= 45%

Live Data In The Occuspace Portal

The simplest way to view your real-time live data is with the Live Data module in the Occuspace Portal. You can view live occupancy data for any of your spaces using the Space Tree which will present the data to you in cards reflecting that level and any immediate children.

You can also view live data without leaving your Analytics views, by clicking on Space Details in the upper right.

Clicking on Space Details in any view will reveal the Space Details panel that includes Live Data

View Live Data, Capacity, floor plan, and hours in Space Details.

Digital Signage

Live data from your spaces can be leveraged for use in large format digital displays and browsers to help visitors to the space understand the busyness of various locations. It assists with people who are looking for a quiet empty floor to study in a library, to inform employees of the current wait time for the office cafeteria and dining room, or for programming to orient towards busier spaces. You can set up as many Digital Signage instances as you like displaying Live Data for specific neighborhood spaces.

Occuspace provides ready to go Digital Signage URLs that load live busyness data from your spaces for visitors

Setting Up Digital Signage

The Spaces section of the Customer Portal has subsection called "Digital Signage".

Similar to "Hours" and "WiFi Credentials", this subsection is available at the topmost level of the Spaces section for Admin & Setup level users of your account. These users can create, configure, edit and delete Digital Signs.

• Clicking on "Digital Signage" takes the user to a listing of the current Digital Signage for that customer. For each Sign, the current URL is shown and clicks through to the live sign in a new browser tab.

Creating New Digital Signs

You can create or edit Digital Signage for any of your spaces with a WYSIWYG editor that shows a real-time preview of the Sign as you create and modify it:

Brief video to show how you can create and manage Digital Signs

As the video above will show you, there are a few key options when you create Digital Signs.

• You can choose up to 8 total spaces to feature on a Sign, each represented as a unique card.

• The Digital Sign's name, as well as the names of the individual spaces, can all be edited by clicking on the edit icon next to any name.

• You can drag the cards to change the display order to what they desire.

• Optional QR code and label functionality is also supported.

• A toggle option is provided to show or hide the capacity display, providing flexibility in how you define capacity.

Once you set up a a new Digital Sign, you will receive a URL that you can use in your digital signage displays to easily display this valuable data in your locations.

Integration With Hours

Digital Signage leverages our Hours functionality to correctly indicate if spaces are open or closed.

• If the space is already used in Waitz or another Digital Sign, it will automatically reflect the same hour rule applied to as what is being used in the other locations.

• Spaces not previously used in Waitz or another Digital Sign will initially use the global hour rule of being open 24/7. Users can then modify the hours for the space itself in Space Details (by clicking the edit icon next to the hours), or in the "Hours" section where they can create a new hour rule or associate one of their existing hour rules.

Waitz

Occuspace offers a consolidated consumer service for providing live busyness data on public spaces for our higher education customers. The service is called Waitz, and it is used by the various student bodies of these institutions to improve their campus experience. Waitz is an easy way for universities and colleges to leverage a high quality user experience and Web platform infrastructure to provide this data without any technical expertise or setup work required. Waitz is available through branded Web pages and also through a native mobile app (available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store). Waitz serves millions of data requests each month from higher ed institutions across the United States and Canada.

Waitz provides a native app experience (Apple App Store & Google Play Store) and Web pages for reporting busyness information at higher education campuses in North America

Waitz can be set up for any of your public spaces if you are a higher education customer of Occuspace and want to provide your students with another way to improve their campus experience. Contact your Occuspace Account Manager if you would like to learn more and have your spaces listed on Waitz.

Digital Signage and Waitz display Open & Closed Hours that you can easily update in our portal. For more on Hours, please review this section and short video under Managing Your Spaces.

Customer API

Live data is also available through the Customer API which provides REST endpoints to access live data for spaces being measured by Occuspace. This method is recommended for more sophisticated user experiences where only the data points are provided by Occuspace and the customer handles all presentation needs and complexities. The Customer API is also valuable for customers looking to ingest live data into their own data stores or business intelligence platforms. Our Account Management team can get developers set up with an authorization bearer token, and our latest API documents are available here.