Why did the line stop?
The PLC knows the line stopped. IRIS sees what happened to stop it.
It doesn’t just detect the outcome. It keeps the exact moment the problem started, what was around it and who or what stepped in. Here are twelve industrial sectors and the cameras already installed in each one.
Without IRIS, this is a plant where what happened gets reconstructed by asking around.
AI-generated image
What repeats in almost every plant
The processes are nothing alike, but the problems are. Not knowing why production stopped. The wrong material going in. Spotting a fire, a leak or a spill too late. Somebody inside an exclusion zone. A near miss between a forklift and a person. A machine opened without lockout. And, at the end of the shift, having no proof of what happened.
When a line stops, a material goes the wrong way or a situation starts to turn dangerous, IRIS doesn’t wait until the end of the shift to find out. It detects it as it begins and keeps the video that explains why.
And now the limit, in full and up front, because it’s what makes everything above useful. A camera sees people, vehicles, objects, smoke, flame, spills, build-ups, doors, postures, PPE and the visible state of a line. On its own it doesn’t confirm a gas concentration, a bacterium, a microscopic allergen, the chemical make-up of an ore, actual tightening torque or the temperature inside a closed reactor. With a thermal camera it does read the heat you can see from outside; what’s inside, it doesn’t.
That’s why IRIS doesn’t replace SCADA, MES, safety sensors or quality systems. It works alongside them: they provide the process data and IRIS provides the picture, the context and the exact minute it started. Where a gas detector is needed, a gas detector is needed, and we say so here rather than in a footnote.
See it for yourself
No extra alarms here. Just what needs looking at.
Not a recorded video, not an explanatory drawing: a summary of the real screen, with a different case every time it starts. There’s a lot more behind it.
- The alert fires
- You open it
- You confirm or dismiss
What gets asked on the plant visit
The ten questions that have to be answered before signing.
Answered in the first line, with the limits up front. A plant has dust, steam and backlight, and that gets told here too.
Does it work with the cameras we already have in the plant?
Yes, it works with the cameras you already have in the plant. IRIS connects to the feed of the IP cameras already installed and analyzes it as it arrives: what changes isn’t the equipment, it’s what gets understood from the picture. Now the uncomfortable part: a factory floor isn’t a hallway with steady light. Dust from a crusher, steam from a cooking room and the backlight of an open bay door all degrade what can be seen, and some framings simply fall short. During the project we check camera by camera and tell you plainly which ones work, which would only need moving a few degrees, and which aren’t good enough for what you want to see there.
Is this for keeping an eye on the operators?
No, this isn’t for keeping an eye on the operators, and that has to be said in plain words. IRIS does not identify anybody: it detects that there are hands inside an open machine guard, not whose hands they are. It does not recognize faces, does not compare them against any database, is not a time clock and cannot be used to discipline a particular person. What reaches the alert is the situation, where it’s and since when. If the plant has a works city, this is the first thing you should be able to show them, and the sooner the better: a system that looks at situations, not at people.
Does IRIS stop the machine or connect to the PLC?
No, IRIS doesn’t stop the machine and doesn’t connect to the PLC. It touches no control, cuts no line, and doesn’t replace the interlock, the lockout-tagout procedure or the safety plan. What it does is flag the situation while it’s happening — with the camera, the time and the video — so that whoever is in charge of that area can decide. The decision stays with a person, and it has to: on a plant floor, the judgment of the person standing there is worth more than any automation. IRIS adds what that person is missing, which is a pair of eyes where nobody’s looking right now.
How many alerts will we get per shift?
You will get the alerts your rule asks for, and tuning that rule is the work of the first month. A system that throws a hundred alerts a shift gets turned off within a week; we know that, which is why a rule is never “alert if someone is near the forklift.” It is “alert if a person on foot is inside the forklift aisle, during production hours, for more than a few seconds.” You bound the zone on the image, the hours, how long the situation has to last and who receives it. You start with what really matters in that building, review a week of alerts with your team and adjust. An alert nobody attends to is a badly configured alert, and that gets fixed.
Does the video leave the factory?
The video leaves the factory or stays inside depending on the mode you choose, and there are two modes. In local mode it doesn’t leave: the servers are on your premises, the video comes in over your network, it’s analyzed there and the system doesn’t need internet to work. That matters in a plant where the line drops or where the connection is poor. In the other, it’s processed in our data center — which is our own cloud, not a third party’s — and then it does leave, encrypted and under the terms signed in the contract. In an industrial group the usual answer is a mix: sensitive inside, the rest outside.
We have plants in different sectors. Do we need a separate system for each one?
You don’t need a separate system for each plant: it’s the same system, and what changes is what you ask of it. A pharmaceutical airlock, a chemical containment and a recycling belt are very different scenes, but underneath they are the same thing: a zone drawn on the image and a rule written in words. That’s why a new plant doesn’t start from scratch, and why a steel works and a food factory can share the same way of working. And something appears that a single plant doesn’t have: comparison with the same yardstick. The same rule, written the same, applied everywhere, so you can see where the situation repeats and which plant is worth visiting.
What’s it that IRIS can’t see in a plant?
IRIS doesn’t see what doesn’t fit in a picture, and in a plant that list matters. It doesn’t read a sensor or a PLC: it doesn’t know the temperature of a furnace, the pressure in a line or the concentration of a gas. It doesn’t see inside a closed machine, a vessel or a pipe. A colorless gas is invisible, and very thin smoke isn’t seen early either. That’s why IRIS isn’t fire detection nor gas detection, and replaces neither: those installations stay where they are. What IRIS sees is what can be seen: flame, smoke once it’s visible, liquid on the floor, an open door, a person where they shouldn’t be.
Does it replace our sensors, our safety installation or our prevention plan?
No, it doesn’t replace your sensors, your safety installation or your prevention plan: it lives alongside all of them. A sensor measures one quantity at one point; IRIS understands a whole scene. They’re different things and you need both. What IRIS adds is the layer you are missing today: watching every camera at once and telling you what is happening in front of them. You can keep recording and managing video where you do it now, because IRIS is an NVMS and sits on top. What gets integrated and how is decided by looking at your actual system, not by promising in advance that we fit with everything.
Besides alerting, can it measure?
Yes, besides alerting it can measure, and the two aren’t configured the same way. An alert is written with a sentence. A measurement is drawn: a line that gets crossed, a zone that gets occupied. Out of that comes a figure per hour, per shift and per season: how many people are inside an area, how many pallets pass a point, how long a line has been stopped. Asking is for searching. Counting is for measuring. And they aren’t done the same way: a line can’t be described in a sentence, it has to be traced. For people counting our system is approved by the Centro Español de Metrología — Spain’s national metrology institute — so that figure has been verified by a third party and not by us. Worth putting precisely: that approval covers people counting, not the whole product. The approval is Spanish. It doesn’t stand in for a U.S. certification, and we don’t present it as one.
How much does it cost to put it in a plant?
You pay per camera. What it comes to depends on how many cameras are analyzed, what’s asked of each one, how many plants are included, which deployment mode you choose and whether the hardware is yours or ours. We don’t publish a price list because it wouldn’t be honest: a building with eight cameras and three rules and a group with twelve factories aren’t the same project. What you can do is start small: two or three spots in one plant, the rules that really matter there, and look at the alerts and the figures with your team before deciding anything. Tell us how many cameras you have and what you want to see, and we’ll give you a figure. Write to hola@infinityneural.com. Or call Spain: 011 34 902 02 70 91.
Next step
Who sees the sales that never reach the register?
10 cases: 4 raise an alert when something happens and 6 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
Who is watching when the load swings over somebody?
11 cases: 9 raise an alert when something happens and 2 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
And the best part
By the eighth hour of a shiftnobody watches the way they did in the first. That isn’t a flaw.
It’s being human. A camera has no eighth hour: at four in the morning it understands what it understood at noon, and it speaks up just the same.
Tell us your problem and we’ll say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
A person answers, the same working day.