Nx Venue Innovation Hackathon Winners: Smarter Public Spaces with Intelligent Video

Network Optix is proud to announce the winners of our recent Nx Hackathon, where developers tackled the challenge of transforming public spaces with innovative, AI-powered video solutions. Using the Nx EVOS platform and developer tools, participants delivered visionary solutions designed to improve crowd safety, optimize venue operations, and elevate the overall visitor experience. Let’s take a look at some of the standout ideas that rose to the top. 

Nx Hackathon Overview: Venue Innovation

Public venues such as stadiums, metro stations, and concert halls are complicated environments where safety, experience, and efficiency must be managed in real-time. The Nx Venue Innovation Hackathon invited developers to address these challenges using the powerful capabilities of Nx EVOS, including Nx AI Manager and Nx Toolkit, to create scalable solutions powered by video intelligence.

Developers were encouraged to innovate around themes such as crowd flow monitoring, safety alerts, audience engagement, and access control, resulting in a wide range of creative, deployable concepts. The following three projects stood out for their ingenuity, impact, and effective use of the Nx framework.

VenueFlow AI - First Place

Occupancy and Crowd Flow Monitoring by Morale Study

Developed by Morale Study, VenueFlow AI is an intelligent video analytics system designed to monitor occupancy levels and track real-time crowd movement across large venues. Built with safety, compliance, and visitor comfort in mind, the system leverages heatmaps and anomaly detection to provide venue operators with actionable insights.

Key Features & Highlights: 

• Visualizes real-time crowd density and movement through dynamic heatmaps, with simplified sectional views for faster operator response.
• Automatically detects anomalies like overcrowding, blocked pathways, and sudden dispersals, triggering mobile push notifications and in client alerts.
• Utilizes YOLOv8, DeepSORT, and LSTM models to power occupancy counting, flow tracking, and behavioral anomaly detection.
• Stores and analyzes historical occupancy data via Nx Metadata SDK for reporting, compliance, and trend insights.
• Seamlessly integrates with Nx AI Manager and Nx Toolkit for deployment, custom overlays, and PA-based emergency guidance workflows.
• Offers a scalable, high-performance framework ideal for peak capacity event environments requiring real-time visibility and proactive safety measures.

VenueFlow AI provides a powerful tool for maintaining safe, efficient environments while enhancing the guest experience, ensuring venues operate smoothly even during peak capacity events.

MetroLine 1 Safety - Second Place

Security and Safety CCTV by Vision Zero

Created by the Vision Zero team, MetroLine 1 Safety is a multi-purpose AI-powered CCTV solution built for Ho Chi Minh City’s metro system. With real-time detection capabilities and an advanced event management interface, this project redefines how transit authorities can monitor, manage, and respond to critical events.

Key Features & Highlights:

• Detects and classifies incidents such as fire, smoke, theft, and unauthorized access using YOLOv8 and CLIP models for fast, on-server analysis.
• Enhances contextual awareness with InternVL 1B vision language models that extract attributes and generate descriptive metadata.
• Enables operators to search and correlate incidents using image or text queries via a vector-based event database (MariaDB with cosine similarity).
• Centralizes visualization through a custom dashboard with incident overlays, event tagging, and exportable charts.
• Integrates with Nx AI Manager, Nx Toolkit, and external systems such as IP speakers, signal towers, and network endpoints (FTP/SMTP).
• Built for scalable deployment across transit systems, combining real-time detection with flexible, operator-defined rules for adaptive incident management.

MetroLine 1 Safety ensures safer public transport by enabling operators to respond to threats as they occur, reducing response times and streamlining safety workflows.

CrowdPulse - Third Place

Audience Engagement Monitoring by Très Tigré

Developed by Très Tigré, CrowdPulse is an AI-powered platform for real-time audience management monitoring at live events. Designed to assist speakers, educators, and event managers, the system provides a “pulse check” on attentiveness using facial expression, drowsiness, and head pose detection.

Key Features & Highlights:

• Monitors audience attentiveness using emotion detection, head pose, and drowsiness tracking, with customizable event triggers for sudden engagement drops.
• Predictive model built on XGBoost, trained on academic datasets, calculates live engagement scores during sessions.
• Deploys models via Nx AI Manager and tags events in real-time, displaying visual cues over video feeds within the Nx client.
• Includes a web-based dashboard for reviewing engagement trends post-event, with desktop and mobile access for cross-platform usability.
• Offers measurable, data-driven insight into audience behavior, replacing subjective feedback with actionable analytics to improve speaker performance and content delivery.

CrowdPulse delivers a practical, AI-driven solution for turning real-time audience behavior into meaningful feedback, helping presenters refine content and maximize impact across any live experience.

Congratulations to Our Winners!

We extend our sincere congratulations to the winners of the Nx Venue Innovation Hackathon. These innovative solutions demonstrate how the right tools combined with creative thinking and technical expertise can solve real-world problems in meaningful ways.

Whether it’s managing crowds, enhancing transit safety, or gathering engagement insights from live audiences, these applications show what’s possible when developers build on Nx EVOS. We’re excited to see how these solutions continue to evolve and how they’ll shape the future of intelligent venue management.

Stay tuned for more updates, success stories, and opportunities to innovate as we continue to build the future of video-powered intelligence with the Nx Developer Community.