Visualisation of Spectator Activity at Stadium Events

Recent advances in mobile device technology have opened up new possibilities in enhancing the experience of spectators at stadium-based sporting events. In creating novel applications for use in such settings, designers must be aware of the current practices of spectators and of features of the environment at such events that novel applications may seek to exploit. This work forms an early part of the Designing the Augmented Stadium project. Data sets have been collected from spectators, logging the results of Bluetooth scans alongside GPS location. This paper presents an information visualization tool that can be used in the analysis and exploration of this data, to provide insight into the activities of spectators, the relationship between an individual spectator and the crowd as a whole and the suitability of stadium environments for applications based on infrastructure such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless mesh networking. Various visualization tools are described and example cases are illustrated, using several real-world data sets recorded at football matches.