What does a mall see beyond the visitor count?
Foot traffic tells you how many came. IRIS tells you what happened inside.
Which door they came in by, which floors they stayed on, which malls they avoided and what changed the day you launched the campaign. We show twelve cameras here: some measure, others raise alerts. A real center has hundreds. The system is exactly the same. And everything counted is anonymous: IRIS counts bodies, it identifies nobody.
Without IRIS this is just people walking through a door.
AI-generated image
Counting is not understanding
Every month a report arrives with the visitor count. It goes up or down, and nobody can explain why. A wing on the second floor has been half empty for six months, and you find out the day the tenant there asks for a rent cut. The campaign cost money, and the only proof it worked is that more people came in that Saturday. Everyone knows about the half-past-one line in the food court, and it’s measured nowhere.
IRIS reads the cameras the center already has. It counts which door people come in by, which floors they pass through, which malls fill up and which go cold, how many come up from the parking lot and how long the wait is at each counter. And all of it is anonymous: it counts bodies and measures routes. It does not recognize faces, it identifies nobody, and it does not follow a person around the center. In a business that lives off visitor data, that line is worth having in writing.
And there are two ways to ask for things, because they’re two different things. What you watch for is described in words: one sentence, and IRIS alerts you when it happens. What you measure is drawn: a line across the threshold, an area on the floor. A line doesn’t fit in a sentence, you have to draw it — which is why Tuesday’s number and Saturday’s are measured the same way, and why they can be audited. Capacity goes further: people counting is approved by the Centro Español de Metrología — Spain’s national metrology institute — through NeuralPax, the body that says whether a truck scale or a speed camera measures correctly. Mind the scope: what’s approved is people counting, not the rest. And there’s one line the camera doesn’t cross: IRIS sees who stops in front of a store window; whether that person went in and bought is something the tenant tells you from their register data. It’s a Spanish approval. What crosses over isn’t the seal, it’s the method: the same line, in the same place, every day.
The real scale
Twelve here. Hundreds in a real center.
This demo shows twelve cases because twelve fit on a screen. A real center has cameras at every entrance, in the parking lot and on its ramps, along the malls of every floor, in front of the store windows, on the escalators, in the food court, in the atrium where events are staged, at the loading spaces, all along the perimeter and at the doors of the restrooms — where access and how often they are serviced are what is monitored, never the inside. Hundreds of them, and a few more with every refurbishment. Nobody can watch them all on a Saturday afternoon; that’s exactly the problem IRIS solves: it analyzes however many there are, all at once, and only interrupts when a rule is met. And where there’s nothing to watch for, it measures: how many people come in through each door, how many go up to each floor, how long the wait is at each counter.
Examples
These twelve are just examples.
Each one shows a different kind of thing: an entrance, a mall, a store window, a line, an escalator, an exit. They aren’t the twelve things IRIS can do: they’re the ones that fit on a screen. Open any of them and you’ll see the image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
Every simulation
Search by license plate
Show me every time that plate crossed the barrier this week, with the time and the video.
- What you’re looking for
- Where to look
- What matches
- Who looks
Now think about yours
Imagine knowing which door your visitors use and which mall they avoid.
The parking lot door brings in twice as many people as the street door, and the tenants paying the highest rent are on the other side. A wing on the second floor that almost nobody walks through anymore since the unit at the end closed. A store window people stop in front of, and another they walk straight past. The weekend campaign that filled the atrium and moved nobody out of it. The half-past-one line in the food court, with one counter overwhelmed and the one beside it idle. The number of people in the atrium during an event, which you must be able to show the authorities. The foot of an escalator where somebody has just fallen. A spill on the floor, half an hour before the first complaint. An abandoned shopping cart in the middle of the walkway. A child on their own who’s been wandering for a while. Smoke in a hallway and the exit blocked by boxes.
All of that is happening in front of cameras your center already owns and already paid for. And nobody knows until someone complains, or until a tenant shows you their sales and asks why. IRIS watches them all at once: it counts what you drew and alerts you when what you wrote comes true, with the camera and the time. And it does it without identifying anyone: it counts bodies and measures routes, it does not recognize faces and it does not follow a person around the center.
What the management committee asks
The ten questions that come up in the management meeting.
Answered in the first line, straight, and with no promises about sales we can’t prove. With the line drawn from the start: everything counted here is anonymous. IRIS counts bodies, it recognizes nobody.
Does it work with the cameras the center already has?
Yes, it works with the cameras the center already has. IRIS connects to the feed of the installed IP cameras and analyzes it as it arrives: what changes isn’t the equipment, it’s what gets understood from the picture. During the project we go camera by camera to see whether the framing is enough for what you want to measure there — a camera hung to watch an entrance may not reach far enough to count in the hallway at the back — and we tell you plainly which ones fall short and which only need turning a few degrees. Adding a new camera is the exception, not the starting point.
Does IRIS identify visitors or recognize faces?
No, IRIS does not identify visitors and does not recognize faces. It compares them against no database, keeps nobody’s identity, doesn’t follow a person from one store to the next and isn’t crossed with any loyalty program. A counted person is a one: nothing else of them is kept. And because this comes up in every meeting, we say it plainly about the lost child: IRIS can flag that a child is alone in an area, but it does not search for a child by their face and does not know who they are. What it does is narrow down cameras and minutes so a person can look, and it’s that person who finds them.
Does the video leave the center?
The video leaves the center or stays inside depending on the mode you choose, and there are two. In the on-site mode it doesn’t leave: the servers sit in your building, the video comes in over your network, it’s analyzed in there, and the system doesn’t need internet to work. In the other one it is processed in our data center, which is our cloud and not somebody else’s. In both, the links are encrypted and the terms are set in the contract. It’s worth deciding early, because putting a server in the building isn’t the same as taking the analysis outside: it shapes the center’s network.
How is this different from the counter we already have at the door?
The difference is that the counter at the door says how many people came, and this says what happened inside: which entrance they came through, which floors they stayed on, which hallways they avoided and what changed the day you launched the campaign. And there are two ways of asking for things, because they’re two different things. What’s watched is described by speaking: one sentence, and IRIS warns you when it happens. What’s measured is drawn: a line across the threshold, a zone on the floor. A line doesn’t fit in a sentence, you have to trace it, and that’s why the number comes out the same way every day, can be repeated and can be audited. On people counting you don’t have to take our word for it: our system is approved by the Centro Español de Metrología — Spain’s national metrology institute, an independent third party. To be precise: that approval covers people counting, not the whole product. That approval is Spanish and it isn’t equivalent to any U.S. certification: we say so up front and not at the end.
Can we hand these numbers to our retail tenants?
Yes, you can hand those numbers to your tenants, and it’s one of the reasons the system gets installed: they’re anonymous, aggregated figures, so they’re shared without passing on anybody’s data. How many people walk past each unit, at what time, and which entrance they came from. What isn’t here is the sale: that sits in the tenant’s register and we don’t go there. But putting the two halves together changes the diagnosis: if plenty of people walk past and almost nobody comes in, the problem is the storefront or the sign. If nobody walks past, the problem is the hallway and not the store. Today those two situations look the same in the report — it sold little — and they’re two different problems with two different fixes.
How many alerts are we going to get in the control room?
You’re going to get the alerts you decide on, because a rule is narrowed down: area, time band and duration. A system that fires two hundred times a day is turned off within a week, and rightly so: when everything alerts, nothing does. That’s why a rule isn’t “tell me if someone is standing on the escalator,” but “tell me if someone is standing at the foot of this escalator for more than a minute, between ten and ten thirty.” Change the area, the band and the minimum time, and the same detector goes from ringing a hundred times a day to ringing when it really matters. And it’s tuned afterward, with whatever comes out in the first two weeks in your center, not in some center in general.
Who decides what gets watched and what gets measured?
The center decides, not IRIS. A rule is written as one sentence anyone can read and anyone can change; a measurement is drawn on the image, as a line or a zone. IRIS applies what you told it, always the same way and without getting tired. It brings no factory list of behaviors and does not decide on its own what is normal in your hallway: normal in a neighborhood center is not normal in a three-floor one with a food court, and the people who work there know it. If the opening hours change tomorrow, a unit closes or the seasonal campaign goes up in the atrium, the rule is rewritten in a few minutes and nothing has to be ordered.
What does IRIS not see on a busy Saturday afternoon?
On a busy Saturday afternoon IRIS stops telling one person from another when they cover each other up, and we’d rather say so before anything is signed. It happens to every vision system, ours included, and anyone who says otherwise hasn’t tried it with the center full. What isn’t lost is exactly what is needed most at that moment: occupancy. Measuring how many people are in an area and how they spread across the floors doesn’t require telling each person apart. What does degrade is counting one by one in a narrow, heavily loaded passage; there the count is moved to the entrance, where people go through in single file. And whatever happens outside the frame, behind a column or in an area with no camera, nobody sees: IRIS neither.
How long does it take to be up and running?
How long it takes depends on the size of the center, and we aren’t going to give you a date we don’t yet control. The work has three clear phases: connecting the cameras that already exist, drawing the zones on each image and writing the rules that matter, and tuning those rules against what actually happens in the center. The first measurements and the first alerts show up early; the fine tuning takes longer, because a quiet day, a Saturday and a campaign day all have to go by. Specific dates go in the proposal, once we know how many cameras there are and what you want to measure on each one.
How much does it cost to put IRIS on a mall’s cameras?
You pay per camera. What it comes to depends on how many cameras are analyzed, what’s measured or detected on each one, which deployment mode you choose and whether the hardware is yours or ours. There’s no single price list that fits everyone, because measuring two entrances and one floor doesn’t cost the same as covering three floors, the food court and the parking lot ramps. And you can start small: the entrances and one floor, look at the numbers with your team, and decide afterward. Tell us how many cameras you have and what you want to measure, and we’ll give you a figure. Write to hola@infinityneural.com. Or call Spain: 011 34 902 02 70 91.
Next step
What if the outage doesn’t start with an attack?
13 cases, and in every one of them IRIS raises an alert when something happens. You see each image as it is, and then with what it understands on top.
And who watches the cameras?
34 cases, and in every one of them IRIS raises an alert when something happens. You see each image as it is, and then with what it understands on top.
And the best part
Video tells you what happened.An alert reaches you while it’s happening.
Reviewing the recording helps you explain. Hearing about it at the time helps you get there. Two different things, and until now you only had the first.
Tell us your problem and we’ll say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
A person answers, the same working day.