Case Study: Vivid Sydney achieves real-time visitor heatmaps and halves build time with RUCKUS Networks SPoT

Vivid Sydney - Customer Case Study

Ruckus partnered with IBM to power the “Heart of the City” installation at Vivid Sydney, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest light festival (1.43 million attendees). IBM needed accurate location-based analytics across a 600–700,000 m2 high-density outdoor environment, proven wireless capacity, flexible AP mounting under council restrictions, and a solution that could be deployed in weeks.

Ruckus delivered a cloud-hosted SPoT positioning engine with ZoneFlex outdoor APs, Point-to-Point bridges and a ZoneDirector controller; BeamFlex and SmartMesh allowed upside-down mounting and a three-day rollout with just eight hours of calibration. The system produced real-time heatmaps for IBM’s display, detected over 750,000 devices, halved development time, delivered consistent coverage with fewer APs, and provided actionable insights (e.g., busiest hour 7pm, average dwell ~12 minutes) to help visitors and organizers.

Vivid Sydney