Maybe you are arriving late, hustling through the terminal with just enough time to clear security and make your flight. Your path from curb to gate is likely to be considerably more direct than that of the traveler who arrived two hours early, with enough time to sit at the bar, sip an old fashioned and strike up a conversation with someone heading to Bali on vacation. Next stop, gift shop.

Those two journeys may seem unremarkable, but to an airport operator, they contain a surprising amount of information. Where passengers walk, where they stop, how long they wait and where crowds begin to build can reveal bottlenecks before they become problems, help determine when another security lane should open and even show whether travelers have enough time after clearing security to shop, eat or simply make it to their gates.

Outsight, a Paris-based company specializing in 3D spatial intelligence, says its technology now measures passenger movement at airports that collectively handle more than 280 million passengers annually, a milestone that shows just how quickly a new generation of passenger-flow monitoring is spreading through some of the world’s busiest transportation hubs. Its system processes more than 2 terabytes of 3D data every minute, turning the movement of passengers and vehicles into a continuously changing digital representation of an airport.

The technology is operating at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Rome Fiumicino, Bordeaux Airport and Singapore Changi, among other locations. Costa Rica’s Juan Santamaría International Airport also uses the technology, while Paris airport operator Groupe ADP has previously deployed Outsight technology at Paris-Orly. Outsight says additional installations are operating at other major airports in the U.S.

At Dallas Fort Worth, Outsight is undertaking what it describes as the world’s largest airport deployment of 3D LiDAR technology. The system is designed to create what the company calls a “Motional Digital Twin,” essentially a living 3D model showing the movement of people and vehicles through the airport. At other airports, the technology monitors areas ranging from immigration and check-in halls to security lanes, gates, taxi queues and curbside drop-off zones.

The idea is not simply to count people. Airports already know how many passengers are flying. What they have traditionally had far less ability to determine is where those passengers are at any particular moment, how quickly they are moving and where trouble is beginning to form.

Outsight’s system uses LiDAR, short for light detection and ranging, which sends laser pulses into the surrounding environment and measures their return to construct a three-dimensional picture of the space. Instead of producing a conventional photograph or video, the technology sees geometry: the shape and location of a person, vehicle, suitcase or other object and how it moves through space.

Each detected person can be assigned a temporary anonymous spatial identifier, allowing the system to follow that person’s trajectory through a monitored area. That means an airport can determine that one anonymous traveler spent seven minutes in a security line, another lingered in a retail area and hundreds more are converging on a checkpoint faster than it can process them. Operators can then shift employees, open additional lanes, redirect passengers or respond to congestion before a line becomes unmanageable.

There is a commercial side to knowing all of this, too. A passenger who spends 40 minutes standing in a security line has 40 fewer minutes to spend at restaurants, stores and lounges. Understanding where time is being lost can therefore help an airport improve the passenger experience while also giving concession operators a clearer picture of how people use terminal space.

Following millions of people through airports, however, inevitably raises the concern of surveillance. Outsight draws a firm distinction between the two. LiDAR does not capture a traveler’s face, name, age, address or other biometric identity. A person appears to the system as a three-dimensional form moving through space, associated with an anonymous identifier rather than a name. The company says its measurement is anonymous by design because the underlying LiDAR sensor captures geometry and motion rather than conventional images.

Outsight’s platform is capable of combining its LiDAR-derived information with other airport data sources, including cameras, Wi-Fi systems, boarding-pass information and point-of-sale data. That does not mean the LiDAR system itself suddenly recognizes a face, but it does mean airports have the technical ability to place anonymous spatial information within a much larger data ecosystem. How those additional systems are configured, what information is combined and what rules govern its use become important questions as the technology expands.

About 16 years ago, Boston’s Logan International Airport began testing a very different technological leap. A roughly 24-inch white half-orb mounted high above Terminal A contained nine camera lenses and blended their feeds into a single high-resolution panoramic image. Developed by engineers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with support from the Department of Homeland Security, the prototype could maintain a 360-degree view while operators simultaneously zoomed in on different parts of the terminal.

The goal then was explicitly security. The system could monitor designated areas and help authorities locate someone who entered through a restricted exit, potentially avoiding the enormous disruption of shutting down and evacuating a terminal. Developers were already contemplating a future in which video analytics could automatically detect an abandoned object or other suspicious activity.

Outsight represents an evolution of that basic technological ambition, but also a departure from it. The Logan camera sought to give security personnel a better set of eyes. Outsight’s LiDAR system is designed to give airport operators something closer to spatial awareness.

Outsight says its technology can monitor overcrowding, vehicle speeds, curbside overstays, wrong-zone parking and other conditions affecting safety and security. Its spatial data could also complement existing airport cameras and other security systems.

But using the technology to identify a particular individual would require something Outsight’s LiDAR does not inherently collect: identity information from another source.