MOVIE THEATER MAYHEM Patron Booted ... WOULDN'T SIT IN ASSIGNED SEAT?!?

[Harold Hallikainen]

Kinepolis, a Belgian chain now also with a major footprint in Canada, experimented with seat detection in some of their then newly built complexes about 10 years ago. There was an actual console with the seating plan at the entry: White were unsold seats, green were correctly occupied seats and red were wrongly occupied seats, so it was pretty easy for staff to detect wrongly occupied seats. I don't think they ever rolled this system out beyond the two cinemas they tested this in, but those kind of systems do exist and maybe this cinema does have something similar.

That's interesting, though it may be cost more than it's worth. A couple technologies come to mind. One would just be a high resolution IR camera above the screen that has a view of all the seats. It could detect which seats are occupied. Another would be switches that detect the seat has been folded down. A low power RF beacon on each seat could make it work with several years of battery life. Carrying it even further, the seat could be locked in the folded up position until the seat is sold. That could help prevent people going from auditorium to auditorium to see a triple feature while only paying for one. But, again, this would probably be an expensive solution to a problem that does not exist or is perhaps minimal.

Harold

[Gordon McLeod]

"Kinepolis, a Belgian chain now also with a major footprint in Canada" They are the second largest english language cinema circuit in Canada operating as Landmark Theatres They offer reserved seating at almost all locations

[Mike Blakesley]

The main reason we decided to go to reserved seating is our out-of-town patrons. We get a lot of people who drive in from little towns around us, which can be up to 60 or 70 miles away in a couple of cases, and it was no fun having to turn people away in some situations. Plus, it is a huge selling point to say "you can guarantee your favorite seats!" Even the locals love it for that. And you don't have to arrive 30 minutes early to get your chosen seats.

The other cool thing is, some people just get a kick out of technology. Older people who have used the system think it's just so cool when they make it work.

The best thing for us is, it enables us to sell 100% of the seats. Before, we would usually shut off at about 75% because people would walk in, and come back out saying "there's no place to sit," even when there were plenty of seats available -- they were all just next to other people. But with the reserved, they can see beforehand that they will be sitting next to someone and it is no big deal to most people.

We also have a photo of the auditorium taken from behind the back row, upon which I have added the row letters, so people can get a visual of where they will be sitting while they're selecting their seats. They'll look at it and say "give me something in row F or G." That photo has probably eased people's gripes more than anything else.

[Matt Smith]

There is more to this story than what is being shown in the video I suspect. It does seem a bit unnecessary to eject someone for sitting in the seat next to the one they booked, in what seems to be a fairly quite auditorium. Although the cinema staff seem to have handled it well.

It reminds me of when I went with a friend to a show at the Royal Albert Hall. We shuffled into our seats but it turns out I held the ticket for my friends seat, and he held mine. He went to the bathroom before the show started and someone came around checking tickets and they insisted that I sat in the seat in my friend’s seat which I had the ticket for, no matter what I said about my buddy coming back with the other ticket they weren’t having it so I duly moved over one seat!

[Marcel Birgelen]

That's interesting, though it may be cost more than it's worth. A couple technologies come to mind. One would just be a high resolution IR camera above the screen that has a view of all the seats. It could detect which seats are occupied. Another would be switches that detect the seat has been folded down. A low power RF beacon on each seat could make it work with several years of battery life. Carrying it even further, the seat could be locked in the folded up position until the seat is sold. That could help prevent people going from auditorium to auditorium to see a triple feature while only paying for one. But, again, this would probably be an expensive solution to a problem that does not exist or is perhaps minimal.

Yeah, a high-res IR cam may do the trick nowadays, but I guess about 10 years ago, that technology wouldn't be anywhere sufficiently reliable. Also, it would still require quite a lot of calibration/training for its initial setup. There is little information available, but the whole thing was part of their so-called "Open Foyer" concept. In that concept, there would be nobody checking your tickets and the foyer would essentially be open for anybody, with or without ticket. Maybe they envisioned the foyer to become more of an open gathering space rather than an enclosed space, exclusive for valid ticket holders. AFAIK the actual concept was only implemented in their complexes in Bruges, Ostend and Kortrijk. I've only ever seen it in action in Bruges and that was years ago, but it wasn't a (f*cking) fairy tale, it actually existed.

As it was explained to me, it worked with pressure sensors inside the seats, probably a bi-metallic sensor like you'll find inside a car seat. The seats were all wired up to some kind of bus system. So, I guess you have just one set of bus-wires per row. If you're building a whole new cinema from the ground up, I guess the added costs are somewhat limited, but retrofitting this system in an existing auditorium seems pretty cost-prohibitive, especially given the limited functionality. Maybe, if you really want to go without someone checking tickets at the entrance of the auditorium or somewhere down the lobby, it can save you a few FTE and then stuff might look different, but I've never seen the Open Foyer concept seen implemented in the same way somewhere else.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

The State Theatre in Easton Pennsylvania, built in 1927, has built into the back wall of the auditorium a panel with light grid representing the seats. When a seat was lowered to sit on it, the light for that seat would go off. This allowed people to easily see available seats as they entered the auditorium. While the system has not worked in decades, I was told it is original to the building. I have been in a lot of old theatres over the years and I have never seen this at another venue.

[Randy Stankey]

A seat sensor system can easily be made with switches and wires attached to the seats but that can be unwieldy because of all the wiring and circuitry needed to make it work. Wires break. Switches fail. Anything can go wrong.

Yes, it can also be done with machine vision using video cameras but that takes a lot of computing power which can also go wrong.

Why not do it with some kind of RFID system? Such a system could consist of many RFID devices attached to the bottoms of the seats.

One RFID device could have a solid state tilt sensor, a decision circuit and an RFID antenna. When the sensor is polled by the RFID base station, it responds with its own unique ID number and a "1" or "0" depending on whether the seat is up or down.

The RFID base sends out a poll signal and the remote devices all ping back. This happens, say, once per minute.
Not all devices need to respond at the same time so that signal collisions are avoided. You can divide the room up into groups. You only poll one group at a time.

I can see a few problems with this idea but it's only intended as a starting point to build from.

[Marcel Birgelen]

In this case, the seats weren't of the fold-down type, so they operated on a pressure sensor. I think that if you're able to use a stateless pressure sensor, it will outlast most mechanical switches.

The RFID system may be a neat solution, though I don't know if it would be sufficiently reliable to power a pressure sensor. The amount of energy captured by an RFID receiver is really just tiny and doesn't allow for a lot of external circuitry. It would also be interesting to see how well it would work in today's challenging environment where almost everybody has a bunch of RFID enabled cards and/or gadgets on them.

The State Theatre in Easton Pennsylvania, built in 1927, has built into the back wall of the auditorium a panel with light grid representing the seats. When a seat was lowered to sit on it, the light for that seat would go off. This allowed people to easily see available seats as they entered the auditorium. While the system has not worked in decades, I was told it is original to the building. I have been in a lot of old theatres over the years and I have never seen this at another venue.

Imagine the incredible amount of wiring such a system would require, especially in those times were there wasn't a digital bus system readily available.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I'd be tempted to try Bluetooth Low Energy. Because of the low transmit duty cycle, you should be able to get years of life from a small battery. Also, f there are fold down seats, you might be able to recover enough energy from the seat fold down/up to power it. Maybe you could even get enough energy from seat compression as the person sits down. I THINK I once heard of RF linked toggle switches for lights that were powered by the toggle itself. It MIGHT be possible to attach a unit to the bottom of the seat that has a weight that moves when the seat is flipped down or up. The movement of the weight would cause the ID to be transmitted (and charge a capacitor so additional transmissions could be made in case there were collisions). But, again, this may be a solution in search of a problem where the costs cannot be justified.

I was considering using a BLE beacon for auditorium identification in RF linked closed caption systems so users always get the right captions (the system I designed uses IR for captions, but the bandwidth was not suitable for sign language video, so I was looking at RF links). Another possibility for auditorium identification was an ultrasonic beacon. I never got a chance to play with these ideas further, though.

Harold

[Carsten Kurz]

I know cinemas in Germany having wired systems like this in the 50s as well. I guess it would be easy enough (as a retrofit, at least) to wire through a row with switches, and then have a transmitter per row. The transmission could be triggered by seat switch transitions, so, even battery powered systems could indeed operate over long periods. That said, auditoriums with carpets could probably be all wired even in retrofits, as the necessary wiring would be tiny.
We could actually benefit from such a system, as we have no numbered seats, so, the person at the box office knows how many tickets have been sold per segment, but not their distribution within that segment, so, if a group of 4 comes in late, we don't know if they will be able to sit together in the limited number of back rows.

Harold - there are indeed RF remote switches that take their energy from the mechanical key press by 'energy harvesting'. I first saw one using simple analog ISM band signalling many years ago, but nowadays you can find them using more advanced low energy RF protocols like ZigBee for smart home applications. 'EnOcean' is a brand.

When I compare the energy contained in a key press to that of a person throwing himself down in a folding seat, I start to think what else could be done with that huge amount of energy contained in an outsold auditorium. Maybe powering a laser projection system one day?

- Carsten

[Randy Stankey]

I read about energy harvesting modules that take 60 cycle RF energy from nearby electrical wires and turn it into usable electricity.
They don't produce a whole lot of energy but just enough to charge a battery or super capacitor. I wonder if that's a viable idea to keep small modules like ours powered up.

I'm not beholden to the idea that these modules use RFID or anything. I thought of using RFID because modules could sit silent and not transmit or use much energy until polled by the system or activated by somebody sitting. It could be Bluetooth or even Zigbee.

The kernel of the idea is that we could make small postage stamp sized modules that can be affixed to the bottom of theater seats.
Zigbee.JPG
Of course modules would be encased in a hard, plastic shell or embedded in epoxy resin or some such thing. Think like those little "Tile" modules that you can attach to your car keys and things.

All you would need is a transmitter/receiver station and a bunch of postage stamp modules. You install the transmitter in the auditorium and stick the modules on the seats. You could use sticky pads but curious people could peel them off or mess with them. You'd probably need to screw it in place or embed it into the seat shell. The end user records the serial numbers on the back of the modules and plugs those numbers into some software program that keeps track of which module is in what location and whether its last report was "up" or "down."

[Randy Stankey]

... When I compare the energy contained in a key press to that of a person throwing himself down in a folding seat, I start to think what else could be done with that huge amount of energy contained in an outsold auditorium. Maybe powering a laser projection system one day?

How much energy is contained by the asses of 1,000 people sitting in chairs?

It sounds silly when you first hear the idea but, then, you think, "Hey, wait a second! That might actually be a good idea!"

[Frank Cox]

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[Randy Stankey]

Gas powered?

[Carsten Kurz]

Another story just recently has been told to me by a former employee of that large multiplex at Cologne: They wanted to save on auditorium admission check staff, or 'ushers', as you call them.

So they did in fact install IR-sensitive surveillance cameras in all the auditoriums that allowed them to compare occupied seats vs. sold seats through an image analysis system.
They stopped it quickly, because it turned out, they needed even more staff to clear issues with patrons occupying wrong seats than were previously necessary for admission control ;-)
Admission control only needed a quick look at the ticket, but going into the auditorium towards usually multiple groups of people on wrong seats and having lengthy and often unpleasant discussions or even brawl with them simply didn't cut it.


Actually, such systems are now being marketed by Qube Cinema:

https://www.qubecinema.com/products/icount