Sharp/NEC Repackage AI Audience Measurement Platform As NaviSense
June 13, 2022 by Dave Haynes
One of the announcements a bit lost by me in the InfoComm PR blizzard last week was Sharp/NEC revisiting and re-packaging its AI/computer vision IP as NaviSense.
The product is positioned as “a cost-effective computer vision solution for gathering anonymous customer attributes using off-the-shelf or existing camera sources and processing them through a variety of edge computing devices, such as RPi4. This technology will gather the dwell time of people in front of the display, as well as a variety of other attributes, like their estimated age and gender, the brand of clothing they are wearing, traffic trends and more.”
RPi4 is Raspberry Pi 4, for those who just went cross-eyed from the last paragraph.
NaviSense is a reworked version of ALP, the audience measurement platform developed by NEC prior to the merger/joint venture/marriage with Sharp. The product still has Kelly Harlin, who was the prime person on ALP, running this for the conjoined Sharp/NEC.
NaViSense technology, says the PR, will bring a depth of features to currently available displays and introduce of variety of groundbreaking innovations to the market. Potential use cases include airports, restaurants, busy office buildings, banks and credit union branches and various retail settings.
All of the information collected by NaViSense can be used to improve customer service and the customer experience. For example, in a retail setting, a deeper understanding of customer attributes i.e., clothing color, clothing type and brand logos could inform product mix and digital content.
The new product has a partner now – Guise AI – which seems to be some sort of edge-optimization tech for AI applications like computer vision. “Our technology deployed at the edge delivers feedback rapidly and locally within the system. Localized processing is more efficient (low latency) and it increases the level of security in terms of data privacy. Clients and OEMS who require an accurate, cost-efficient, and secure solution turn to Guise AI to continuously extract patterns and predict from real-time and dynamically changing data to create the greatest impact for end-users.”
“We are thrilled to share NaViSense and our partnership with GuiseAI, Inc. at InfoComm 2022,” says Harlin, Sr. Manager, Solutions Commercialization at Sharp/NEC. “Its practical applications are endless. From uncovering true dwell time to accurately counting people and traffic to collecting audience attributes, the potential uses for NaViSense are only limited by the imagination!”
Thanks for the shout out for NaViSense! NaViSense is a brand new product, built from the ground up by the Solutions team in the US. We learned a lot from our customers and the market while developing ALP. We leveraged those learnings and took a different approach, creating a unique set of data collection models/use cases, using USB cameras and RPi4, that go beyond triggering content at the screen level. It is all being done at-the-edge. Excited for folks to learn more at http://www.sharpnecdisplays.com.