The picture at Juan Santamaría International
Two ways of processing a passenger
Understanding where travellers gather is a different task from deciding who they are. At Costa Rica's Juan Santamaría International, the airport has adopted Outsight lidar spatial intelligence to measure movement and pressure through terminal areas.
The supplier describes a wider deployment after an initial installation, but the evidence gives little detail about measured changes in waiting time. New biometric arrival eGates were also reported live in September 2026, an identity-control service rather than a flow sensor.
The strongest editorial approach is to keep those technologies separate: one supports spatial observations without facial imagery; the other performs identity checks under immigration procedures.
Selected implementations
A terminal movement system in operation
01 / Deployed
Seeing the queue as movement, not a photograph
The operational problem
Airport staff need to know when passengers are building up in a part of the terminal before congestion affects onward processing.
What the sources report
Outsight and trade reporting describe lidar-based spatial-intelligence monitoring at Juan Santamaría, with coverage extended into additional terminal areas.
Why it matters
The useful decision is whether live movement data helps staff adjust queues, space or resources without identifying individual passengers.
What remains unprovenThe current record does not quantify actual airport-wide coverage, prediction accuracy or a measured reduction in queuing.
Sources and verification (2)
The wider register
What else is happening at Juan Santamaría International?
Biometric immigration eGates started operating in September 2026 according to airport evidence. They belong in the wider register: border identity validation has different technology, privacy and performance tests from lidar passenger-flow monitoring.
eGates for arrivals at SJO · Deployed · limited scope
eGates for arrivals went live at SJO on 8 September 2026, the airport said.
Sources and verification (4)
Observation is valuable when it changes operations
San José's lidar use provides a defined case of spatial monitoring; the new arrival gates show a separate border-process change.
For either system, measured airport performance and clearly documented scope would add more than further supplier descriptions.