A partnership between Californian companies Quanergy and Digital Mortar is using lidar to analyse the entire shopper journey.

Quanergy Systems provides lidar sensors and smart 3D perception products. Digital Mortar has developed lidar-based people tracking and analytics for retail and other smart spaces.

The partnership combines Quanergy’s 3D lidar flow management platform with Digital Mortar’s retail analytics to create a practical methiod for accurate full-journey shopper tracking throughout massive store spaces, including malls, stadiums and airports. This provides an understanding of full shopper journeys and conversion patterns, detailed merchandising analytics, foot-traffic comparisons, forecasting, and visualisations of indoor and outdoor spaces.

The combination could let retailers optimise store layouts and displays to improve the effectiveness and performance of their visual merchandising, as well as map the complete shopper journey.

Quanergy’s lidar coverage supports retail deployments in stores and spaces of almost any size, from 460m² mall stores to broader spaces such as malls, multi-level department stores and big-box superstores. In addition to detailed shopper analytics, it enables stores to manage occupancy effectively, enforce social distancing and increase store security.

“By integrating Quanergy 3D lidar flow management platform into our solutions, we’re opening up a new class of stores to the world of detailed in-store shopper analytics,” said Gary Angel, CEO at Digital Mortar. “Quanergy’s platform allows us to accurately track people throughout the entire shopper’s journey, at a much lower cost compared to installing traditional sensor and camera technology, with zero risk to personal privacy.”

The 3D lidar technology provides precise people tracking without capturing or storing any personally identifying information to meet international privacy regulations. The firm’s lidar sensors also have flexible mounting and a 360-degree field of view for complete coverage of large areas with fewer sensors. The sensors can provide reliable performance in any lighting condition and in both indoor and outdoor spaces.

Thanks to its longer range, the lidar-based people tracking requires fewer devices to install and maintain compared with camera-based systems, thus providing a lower total cost of ownership for people tracking in large stores. In addition, the sensors can provide people tracking analytics and security monitoring.

“The partnership between Quanergy and Digital Mortar will give retailers the data they need to understand the end-to-end shopper journey, create better customer experiences, and improve safety and security throughout the store,” said Gerald Becker, vice president at Quanergy, “We’re thrilled to bring the power of lidar technology to new applications in the retail industry.”

Quanergy was founded in 2012 and builds on decades of experience of its team in the areas of optics, photonics, optoelectronics, artificial intelligence software and control systems. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, it sells an AI-powered lidar platform designed to accelerate the automation of key business processes to increase productivity, efficiency and safety. It provides actionable insights to organisations across industries including, mapping, security, smart cities, smart spaces, industrial automation and transportation.

Founded in 2016, Digital Mortar provides analytics and in-store shopper measurement for retailers. Its cloud-based DM1 platform integrates people-measurement data from various technologies and supports full journey analytics to optimise the customer experience. From occupancy and door-counting, to merchandising analytics, predictive queue management and full-journey pathing, Digital Mortar’s analytic suite is said to support optimisation of every aspect of the in-store journey.