All that and more will soon become real at south Florida’s Sun Life Stadium, thanks to a high-tech partnership the Miami Dolphins and IBM announced Tuesday. The agreement incorporates IBM’s cutting-edge analytics technology into the Dolphins’ home stadium, which also hosts many concerts and other events. It will make Sun Life Stadium the most advanced venue of its kind in North America, say IBM and Dolphins officials.
With 75,00 seats, 24,000 parking spots, 1.5 million square feet of space and the world’s largest point-of-sale vending system under one roof, Sun Life Stadium functions almost as its own little city when the Dolphins play or a famous performer comes to town. That’s why the Dolphins are adopting technology originally intended for IBM’s “Smarter Cities” initiative. Aspects of that program have already been implemented by officials in Berlin, Malta and London.
The technology monitors systems of different inputs and outputs — in the Dolphins’ case, for example, traffic patterns on freeways, crowd flow through turnstiles, social media chatter, and the like — then correlates it all in one place to make the data relevant for officials and administrators. At Sun Life Stadium, the information will all be run through IBM’s cloud-based Intelligent Operations Center.
