Hundreds of kids were left standing in a thunderstorm after newly-installed face recognition gates at their school dorms couldn’t identify who they were.
The embarrassing let-down happened as classes ended and the pupils all flooded back to their dorm rooms, with many left drenched from head to toe as they had failed to bring an umbrella.
Images shared online show long queues outside both the boys’ and the girls’ dormitory buildings at Haikou Experimental Middle School, which is in Haikou City, capital of China’s southern Hainan Province.
They are amongst roughly 1,900 pupils who board, with the remaining 300 or so living off campus, school official Wu Tailin revealed
On the day in question, pupils had rushed back to the dorms from class and found themselves stuck in the rain after the facial recognition systems failed to properly handle the ‘peak time’ load, he said.
The software and hardware that replaced the older and supposedly slower staff-and-turnstile system is understood to have failed to recognise pupils’ faces, resulting in repeated attempts and extended wait times.
Wu said: “The system was still responding slowly after calibration, so we turned it off and let everyone in.”
Unnamed pupils, however, have revealed they and hundreds of their peers have been regularly left queuing outside the two dormitory buildings since the system officially came online late April.
One pupil said: “It’s especially bad at the girls dorm. There are nearly 1,000 people there, but there’s only one facial recognition gate.
“After every lunch break and after school it is peak time, and hundreds of us wait outside to have our faces scanned.
“Since the end of April and the start of May, there have been long queues outside the dorms nearly every single day.”
The facial recognition gates were first trialled in December to high approval from teachers and parents, he revealed.
The new software is linked to the school’s cloud system, which provides staff and importantly parents with real-time data showing precise pupil movement.
Wu said: “We’ve informed dormitory staff to turn off the facial recognition gates during peak hours in order to avoid queues.”
He added that the school had ordered more of the pioneering gatekeeping devices to meet the crowd requirements, as well as further improvements to existing systems.
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Story By: John Feng, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
