The Challenge
Located on Sydney's Darling Harbour, the Australian National Maritime Museum brings Australia's maritime history to life through its galleries, historic vessel fleet and cultural experiences.
To extend this storytelling into the surrounding public realm, ESEM Studio deployed STORYBOX, a digital placemaking platform designed to deliver curated cultural content and engage audiences in public spaces. For the Museum, Fleet Stories was created to showcase the remarkable stories and experiences of the people responsible for the Museum's historic fleet.
While digital channels such as social media provide established metrics for reach and engagement, understanding how audiences interact with content in a physical public space presents a different challenge. Traditional methods provide limited insight into how many people encounter an experience or, importantly, how long they engage with it.
STORYBOX therefore needed a reliable, privacy-preserving way to measure audience behaviour and answer two key questions. How many people are being reached, and how long are they engaging with the experience? These insights would provide a clearer understanding of the reach and impact of Fleet Stories and help inform future content, programming and public-space experiences.
The Solution
The collaboration between Meshed and ESEM Studio focused on delivering accurate, reliable people-counting insights to support the Museum's visitation reporting, event planning and understanding of visitor trends, including peak periods throughout the year.
Beyond the Museum, the solution is generating valuable precinct-level insights to help stakeholders better understand pedestrian activity and changing visitation patterns across Darling Harbour. This data is also supporting precinct managers and the nearby major redevelopment project as the area evolves into a new mixed-use commercial, residential and entertainment destination.
The Meshed nCounter People Counting Solution was installed within the STORYBOX digital platform to provide anonymous insights into pedestrian activity, including people counts and dwell time. nCounter uses Wi-Fi signals from smart devices within a defined area to generate anonymised audience metrics without collecting personal information or tracking individuals.
Connected using LoRaWAN, nCounter is compact and highly portable, with mains and solar-powered deployment options. This allows the solution to be discreetly integrated into placemaking infrastructure such as STORYBOX and deployed across a variety of locations, including sites where traditional connectivity and power may be limited.
The Outcome
nCounter has provided STORYBOX with a new layer of data for understanding how audiences interact with cultural programming in public spaces.
Rather than relying solely on observation or assumptions about foot traffic, STORYBOX can use footfall and dwell-time data to understand audience reach and levels of engagement, providing valuable insights to help inform and develop future programming.
For STORYBOX, the privacy-preserving approach is equally important. The solution provides the essential audience metrics required to measure engagement without identifying or tracking individual visitors.
We wanted to have the basics, how many people are in an area, what’s the dwell time? For us, that tells us how many people are connecting with the program that we’re delivering, and what’s their level of engagement as well.
Sarah Barns
Co-Director, Studio ESEM
Key Benefits
Measure audience reach. Understand how many people are present and engaging around public-facing digital experiences.
Understand dwell time. Gain insight into how long audiences remain within the area and their level of engagement.
Privacy-preserving analytics. Collect anonymised audience metrics without collecting personal information or tracking individuals.
Portable and flexible. Compact LoRaWAN connectivity and mains or solar power options support deployment across diverse locations.
Improve programming. Use real-world engagement data to help evaluate and inform future content and cultural programs.
Simple integration. The compact form factor allows nCounter to be incorporated discreetly into digital and placemaking infrastructure.
Turning Public Spaces into Measurable Experiences
The Australian National Maritime Museum deployment demonstrates how nCounter can bridge the gap between physical experiences and digital analytics.
By providing simple, privacy-preserving insights into audience numbers and dwell time, nCounter enables cultural institutions, place managers and experience designers to better understand how people engage with public spaces and use that evidence to inform future programming and investment. The same measurement approach runs across waterfront precincts and retail main streets.
A cultural program in a public space deserves the same evidence a social post gets for nothing.
