Ignite Realtime Blog: Parking Lot Presence

About a month ago Thiago
flew from his home in Brazil to Portland for an in-person visit with
the rest of the team here at Jive. When Matt and I went out to the
airport to pick him up we noticed long lines of fancy new vehicle
presence sensors on the ceiling, one for each short-term parking slot. 

Beyond simply sensing the car’s presence the device includes bright
LEDs that display blue when vacant and red when occupied. Since the
device is mounted on the ceiling it is visible from several aisles away
and can help guide drivers to available parking slots. After a little
searching I came across a presentation by Dan Brame
that provides an overview of the PDX parking technology. It turns out
that the sensors and lights are just the beginning of a system that is
designed to direct drivers to available parking slots efficiently
without the need to drive up and down aisles looking for that elusive
open spot. Apparently, innovation in the parking lot is happening all
over. One of the Clearspace engineers, Aaron, recently came across a blog post about Santa Monica’s real-time parking availability maps as well.

Presence
is a powerful concept, and it isn’t limited to people. Network devices,
parking lot sensors, computers, etc., can all have presence that can be
used to make systems more effective. But, as the example above shows, a
physical representation of presence, such as a desktop signal light,
can be very helpful in some situations. The world is just scratching
the surface of this powerful concept. From something as
straight-forward as rich presence based on your calendar to advanced
sensor networks adapting to topological changes we’ll continue to see
new value created by new presence detection and inference mechanisms as
well as innovative uses of the presence data.   [Planet Jabber]