Major League Baseball’s initiative to bring facial authentication systems to ballparks for faster entry has gained two new stadiums, Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park and Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium, according to MLB.
Using gate technology from NEC, the MLB program allows fans to verify ticket information by simply walking by the gate pedestals and looking at the camera. Fans must pre-enroll in the system via MLB’s Ballpark app by taking a selfie picture and linking that to their ticketing account. Once at the game, fans can use the Go-Ahead Entry lanes and have tickets validated just by walking past and looking at the pedestal’s camera. Multiple tickets on the same account can be verified with one look, allowing groups of family or friends to enter at the same time.
According to a MLB spokesperson, both Cincinnati and Kansas City have two gates each using the Go-Ahead Entry technology. At the start of the season, Go-Ahead Entry systems were also in place in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Houston and Washington, D.C. At the start of the season, at Minute Maid Park the Astros had the technology available at five gates. At Nationals Park, the Nationals had three gates using the Go-Ahead Entry system, while the Phillies had three gates total. Oracle Park in San Francisco has the systems at two gates.
While statistics on the systems’ use have been hard to come by (MLB does not release any actual performance figures on any of the deployments), the San Francisco Giants have been especially pleased with the systems. The Go-Ahead Entry technology was also put in place for the MLB All-Star game events at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas; but according to MLB, the Texas Rangers have not yet decided to deploy the systems for regular league games.
Facial authentication technology for ticketing validation is a process that is starting to take off, with several NFL teams and one MLB team (the New York Mets) already using such systems powered by technology from a startup called Wicket. While MLB did not reveal the provider of its system’s technology, industry sources (as well as several LinkedIn posts by NEC executives) confirmed that the large pedestals used for Go-Ahead Entry deployments came from NEC. The just-opened Intuit Dome, the new home of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, is also using facial authentication technology for ticketing and concessions access.
