Traffic Analysis idea... new business opportunity?

right, so, we have dwell infomation, roughly. That shows where people end up at.

We have anecdotal evidence of people simply flying through areas to get to their destinations, but no solid proof.

Woudln't it be cool if we could track (anonymously, of course) the paths people take through sims?

What i'm thinking:

1) An object by a telehub senses when new avatars come in, and rezzes a child object to follow them. It collects vector information every second or so, and follows the av until it either stops, disappears, or logs out. It then sends back that information (probably out of SL) for some number crunching, and then a trajectory is plotted out.

Alternatively:

2) A piece of jewelry/bling, or shoes or whatever, that is given away free, with the EXPRESS WRITTEN NOTICE that ANONYMOUS movement statistics will be taken, to see where people go (I don't like this one as much, as it would also be tracking you when you're not flying around).

Possibilities with this information:

1) Overlays of Sim maps showing where people are flying. Basic traffic analysis (ie more people fly through Tan than fly through Slate)

2) Major commercial implications; the more eyeballs fly by your business, the more likely some of them will "stick", ie stop by and see what you're selling.

Result: a more efficient placement of resident businesses. Maybe eventually the development of commercial districts as the traffic patterns solidify themselves.

Thoughts?

Lf

I think the info could be damn intriguing. A few thoughts.

For the first method, this would fail to track folks who teleport home then fly somewhere nearby. This may not be a major or common issue, but it seems it would be a gap in coverage.

Method two covers this problem, though yeah, it tracks more than just traffic info. It is also more "Nielsen" with any potential sample bias that entails. Also, opt-in will freak out a lot less people.

Also might get some weirdness since sometimes it seems attachments rez sometiem after teleport, but this could easily be extrapolated with some degree of likely path and only an occasional occurence.

More data is always good

What about the fact that many fly-bys never even rez the scenery they are going by? It would be hard to determine how many avs actually see the shops, etc. that they are passing. However, it would be interesting to note where "pauses" in the flight pattern occurred.

Good idea, LordFly.

If somebody has the gumption, by all means take this and run with it. I don't have the scripting wherewithall to do it; it's just an idea that someone REALLY should do.

Lots of money to be made in it too, I reckon.

Lf

You could plot the points and connect the dots on a map! The result would be something like the comic strip Family Circus where dotted lines show the kids journey through the neighborhood.

"Aimee goes to buy a tutu"
"stops to greet a stranger, slaps them on the rear"
"flies around a tree 3 times"
"runs into a furry and pets him"
"paints graffiti on wall"
"pokes dead body with a stick"
"goes home"

I feel this method is problematic in that how would someone know *what* information the probe was collecting, or even that it was collecting it. It seems to me that this skirts too close to the privacy clauses in the TOS, or conversely that if it is still technically OK it requires the AV to just "trust" that the only info being collected is anonymous motion data. I think you pretty much have to go with telling the Avatars expressly that you are monitoring them which means option "2" below.

As bad as it is, I think this is your only viable option vis a vis privacy etc. It means that your users will be opting in as opposed to being anonymously tracked by Big Brother, even though it also means incomplete data because the user can also "opt out" or take off the attachment.

This kind of thing could be done by LL quite effectively though as they already sit in that "Big Brother" chair.

Radar.

place an object in the sim that reports the possition of all avs once every 2 or 3 seconds. Plot the points on a map, over time the 'rabbit runs' will show up.

People moving fast across a sim may only get detected once or twice, but then they're prolly not seeing the builds rez if they're going that fast.

Rear? Obviously this happened in a PG sim.

*slaps Pol on the cheese cutter*