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New tool to aid socially distanced travel

January 12, 2021 by Mark Anthony

heatmap

This little bit of news should send some of you who believe you are being tracked and monitored, off the deep end!  It’s a new tool currently in Beta that is designed to help those who panic too easily and who want to avoid crowds.  Yes.  Avoid the crowds!  The website is to help travelers identify areas that are less crowded in cities all around the United States.

Known as Crowdfree.me, the platform was created by a team of engineers from Tripadvisor, Slack, Amazon Web Services, and nine other technology companies. It is in beta and has a few bugs to work out.  When I played with it, I had some questions about its accuracy or if it’s actually doing what it was meant to do.  But it was kind of fun to test it out and play around with it to see the crowded areas around Las Vegas change during the day.

Tripadvisor spokesperson Brian Hoyt says the initial idea came from someone who is no longer with Tripadvisor, but another engineer still with the company took the lead on developing the platform.  Then they sought partnership with these other tech companies, whose engineers volunteered their time to develop the system.

“Crowdfree.me is intended to help consumers avoid crowds at both businesses and public places such as parks and beaches. The system uses aggregated, historical traffic data from anonymized cell phone location pings from users that have opted in to share their location via their mobile devices.”

The data is displayed on a map and graphed based on the time of day and the day of the week. Data is not live.  It’s updated once each day and more recent data is weighted higher than older data. Users can click on a specific location or an area to view how crowded it is for each hour on a particular day or on a given day of the week. An overlay of a heatmap also indicates the density of crowds in public areas.  It’s easy to figure out. Yellow for low density and red is for high density.
The website also incorporates location safety scores from ViruSafe by Neura, one of the technology partners.  This is so users can identify public spaces and businesses where COVID risk rates are high. They state that the system does not store personally identifiable information, and none of the data is used for commercial purposes.
Go Ahead and Try it. Then let me know what you think!

Tagged With: heatmap, travel planning, tripadvisor Filed Under: News

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