In the interest of safeguarding student privacy, ASWSU and the Rec Center have decided to implement a general counting system in the gym rather than showing images of the rooms where students are working out.

“Some students felt a live recording could be a privacy infringement,” ASWSU Vice President Jay Hendrickson said.

New analytical cameras will determine how busy a certain area of the Rec Center is, along with how often a specific piece of equipment is being used.

Jeff Elbracht, associate director of the Rec Center, said that when the counter software came forward, ASWSU and the Rec Center decided to see if it could work in place of the live cameras.

If the counter system is successful, the same type of software could be used in the cardio areas and eventually all parts of the gym, Elbracht said.

He said there are more benefits to the counter system than regular cameras.

“The technology can tell how often a piece of equipment is being used, which can then tell the SRC when a piece of equipment is worn down or needs to be replaced,” Elbracht said.

He said the system looks like a camera and analyzes a picture to determine how full a room is. This information would then be transferred to the both ASWSU and the Rec Center’s Web sites.

However, Hendrickson said the analytical camera proposal was not what ASWSU had planned when the idea was developed during his and ASWSU President Derek En’Wezoh’s campaign.

Originally, ASWSU wanted cameras that would feed images over the Internet to show students how many people occupied a certain area of the Rec Center. This concept is similar to the system at the University of Florida, where video cameras show snapshots of the gym and who is using it.

“The analytical camera would just tell students the number of people in a particular place. It wouldn’t tell them what equipment is being used at the time,” Hendrickson said. “That was our original idea.” Hendrickson said though it was not essentially what he had in mind, he hopes the new system is implemented.

“If that’s what we can do, then that’s what we can do,” Hendrickson said.

The Rec Center is working with the vendor of the new technology to determine price estimates.

Elbracht said new software would cost about $1,000, which the Rec Center would pay.

“We found that there was enough flexibility in our budget to move forward with this type of project,” Elbracht said.