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.
Harold
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