Less room per person than three minutes ago, and nobody moves

Half an hour before the doors open, in front of one of the stand gates. People have converged into a compact block that fills half the plaza and narrows toward the opening of the gate. Twenty paces away, on the left, the plaza is practically empty: you can see the ground between one person and the next. Three staff in safety vests have been left on the edge of the block, outside it. In the middle there’s no longer any gap between one person and the next, and the block hasn’t moved for three minutes.

CAM-483 · GATE FORECOURT · CROWD STALLED

What IRIS understands

What it recognizes in this scene

compressed block of people
opening of the stand gate
back of the block, at a standstill
empty plaza right beside it
member of staff on the edge of the block

What this camera measures

An alert says something’s happening. The reading says how much.

4,6 / m²+1,8Square feet per person in the area
0,1 m/s-0,7Speed at which the group is moving
3 minTime it has gone without moving
620People inside the area
3Staff visible on the edge
20:31Time of the alert

The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client’s measurement.

The rule

You decide once. IRIS applies it always.

each person in the gate area has less than three square feet of room and the group has not moved for two minutes

Then

alert the control room with the gate, the square feet per person and how long it has been stopped
save the video from three minutes earlier, when the density started to rise
send the same image to the teams working that gate

The instruction that set it up«Tell me when each person in front of a gate has less than three square feet of room and the group has not moved for two minutes.»

What changes

What changes for whoever runs security at the venue

What hurts in a crowd isn’t how many people there are: it’s how little room each of them has and whether they’re still moving. The first warning sign is that people stop moving forward. IRIS counts the people inside the drawn area and measures how fast the whole mass is shifting: both figures are counted, not estimated. With that, the head of security sees the problem before it shows up on a screen. Opening another gate, holding the flow back or sending staff over is his call.

What people usually ask

Does IRIS predict a crowd crush?

No. IRIS predicts nothing. It states two things it has counted: how much room each person has in a specific area and how fast they’re moving. When the room drops and the movement drops with it, it raises an alert and shows since when. What that means in that venue, with that crowd and at that hour, is read by the head of security. The camera supplies the figure and the video; the judgment belongs to a person.

Does IRIS close an entrance when density rises?

No. IRIS doesn’t act: it doesn’t open, it doesn’t close and it sends nobody anywhere. Opening another gate or cutting off the incoming flow are decisions with knock-on effects, and they’re taken by whoever answers for the venue. What changes is when they’re taken: with density and speed updated by the minute, they’re taken with figures and with time to spare, not once the problem is visible from the window.

Where does the square-feet-per-person figure come from?

From counting. An area is drawn onto the image, it’s told how many square feet it covers on the real ground, and IRIS counts how many people are inside it. It isn’t an estimate: it’s a division. And that’s where it matters: counting people is the only measurement we hold approval for from the Centro Español de Metrología, Spain’s national metrology institute, and it’s NeuralPax that does it, a separate license built into IRIS. If a figure is going to justify closing a gate, it had better be an approved one. The approval is Spanish. It doesn’t stand in for a U.S. certification, and we don’t present it as one.

Other cameras

See it for yourself

This isn’t a video. It’s a slice of the real screen.

A summary of the real interface, played hands-free. You see one case from start to finish; what you don’t see are the other screens, and there are many.