How will facial recognition help you succeed your event.

Have you ever thought of entering an event by just walking pass a machine and then get your badge ready? In addition, the machine can also tell you where is hosting your signed up session and staff bringing you your favorite drink altogether? These scenarios are now feasible thanks to the facial recognition technology implementing in the event management.

The advance of the industry urges planners to provide more personalized services during an event. The US-based start-up, Zenus Biometrics is now developing facial recognition technology applications for the event industry. The technology can also be employed to facilitate the queuing for purchasing merchandises and secure the payment inside an event venue. As the president Panos Moutafis says, the use of facial recognition tech in event industry will be revolutionary and futuristic.

Another proposed application is to evaluate the participants’ engagement by having cameras scanning their face. This no longer requires planners to survey the participants. However, it could be costly due to the high-resolution necessity. What Disney is working on now is to use facial recognition technology to capture people’s emotions. They have cameras installed during movie shows to see if people are expressing desired emotions. By mixing AI with the facial recognition, Disney can now predict how people will react to the movie for ten minutes.

In terms of accuracy, the technology powered by Zenus Biometrics has a match of 99.4% for 1000 participants. But the accuracy will go down along with the event growing bigger. Other concerns are the on-site security and data protection. The company ensures that although the technology requires participants to upload their ID for the on-site verification, the data that go into the system will be processed and deleted immediately afterwards.    

With the facial recognition technology popularized by the introduction of IphoneX, people are looking forward to experiencing it and even getting more familiar with. However, the participants might always be concerned about the “surveillance” that is imposed on them, as well as the data protection. On top of this, the level of acceptance of the technology varies according to different cultures. For example, the technology has already been used in many ways in China, from store payment to security surveillance. However, in most of the Western country, negative reviews and parades for privacy against the technology are more common.

In conclusion, the facial recognition technology can be a powerful tool to personalized your event, but it still needs a lot of improvement in terms of data protection. 

Written by: Yi GU & Eryi LI

Source: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/blog/facial-recognition-tech-for-events-ds0c/