Large city events concentrate thousands of people across several venues. Organisers know the programme but not how crowded each area is at a given moment, and visitors have little way of knowing that a parade is about to start at one site or that a food stall at another has no queue. The result is congestion in some places, empty spaces in others, and poor circulation between event areas.
Rokemon, developed at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus, turns visitors into a live reporting network. Each festival venue has its own virtual “location monster”; app users speak through these monsters to share what is happening on site — that a parade is starting, or that a stall is worth visiting because it is quiet right now — without revealing who they are. Signage installed at the venues displays the event programme, traffic restrictions and the updates exchanged in the app, so the information also reaches people who are not using it.
Under BigClouT, NTT East, Keio SFC and Fujisawa City used Rokemon at the Fujisawa Citizens’ Festival (23–24 September 2017) and the Fujisawa Choi-Nomi Festival (7–8 November 2017) to test whether real-time information exchange could change visitor behaviour, improve circulation between venues and ease congestion. User data was anonymised.
– Anonymous information sharing between organisers and visitors through venue-based “location monsters”
– Real-time updates on event status, stalls and crowding at each venue
– Venue signage showing the programme, traffic restrictions and app updates
– Anonymised collection of participant data for behavioural research
– Designed for multi-venue events to support circulation and congestion relief
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