Stadium Tech Report interviews Mike Ellenbogen, founder and chief innovation officer at Evolv Technology, a maker of advanced weapons detection systems for stadiums, about the future of stadium security screening.
“You have to do screening at the pace of life. If you have to stop, it just doesn’t work.”
Those words, from Mike Ellenbogen, founder and chief innovation officer at the Waltham, Mass.-based Evolv Technology, sum up the company’s approach to security screening at stadiums and other large public venues. The old ways, of waiting in line while fans empty pockets and purses to get through metal detectors, just don’t cut it anymore. That’s why many venues are turning to advanced weapons detection systems, which allow fans to simply walk through detection gates at a normal pace, speeding up entry procedures.
In our conversation with Ellenbogen, Stadium Tech Report learned about his long background in the security screening industry, and how it informed his formation of Evolv, which is one of the leaders in the new security screening technology wave. Why was new technology needed if metal detectors still work as designed? “Stadiums are pretty extreme examples of security needs,” Ellenbogen told us. “They see issues metal detectors were never designed to solve.”
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And some of those new issues had to do with the return of fans after the Covid pandemic lockdowns. With the need for social distancing, long lines like those typically found at the entry points at many large stadiums needed to be shortened or eliminated. Enter new technology like Evolv’s Express system, which is a large panel with two smaller gates on either side that allows fans to be screened for not just metal but all kinds of other threats (like ceramic knives) while walking at a normal pace, even in groups.
In our discussion Ellenbogen talks about how he “brought the band back together,” assembling a team of security experts he knew from previous companies, to build the complex technologies behind the Evolv system. “It took some time to get the technology right,” he said, but is now confident that Evolv systems can screen as many as 3,600 fans per hour — far faster than metal detectors, which typically can only screen a few hundred fans per hour depending upon the system.
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And while the market for new weapons detection systems is getting more entrants, Ellenbogen said it’s not that simple to build something that can perform in the extreme situations sometimes found outside of stadiums.
“In the real world, there’s all kinds of external interference,” said Ellenbogen, who called some of the competing systems “science projects.
“There’s a huge chasm between the lab and the real world,” Ellenbogen said. “Your systems need to work in the heat in Atlanta and in the cold at Green Bay. It’s a challenge to make that leap.”
Eliminating bottlenecks as they happen
One thing we’ve noticed at stadiums where we’ve seen the new systems in place is that the new speed of security screening can cause unforeseen bottlenecks at other intersections, like ticketing. At some venues where Evolv systems are used, the teams have turned around the traditional flow, doing ticket screening first, then followed by security screening to keep the fans moving.
“When you remove the security bottleneck it can shine a spotlight on other bottlenecks,” Ellenbogen said. One possibility for the future is a system that combines ticketing verification with security in a single walk-through procedure, to speed entry up even more.
At the very least, the flexibility and portability of the new systems has already allowed teams to experiment with creating new secure zones outside the stadium walls, a kind of on-site tailgating area that can incorporate more sponsor activations and fan-gathering spaces. The new technology, Ellenbogen said, “opens up a lot of different possibilities, for an entirely new layer of fan experience.”
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