How do you watch properly when there are far more cameras than screens?
Far more cameras than screens: this is where you decide what gets seen
Nobody has one monitor per camera. A control room has hundreds of cameras and a wall with a handful of slots, so the whole job is deciding what gets seen, when, and by whom. IRIS builds that layout in two clicks, saves it under a name and sends it to the wall without you leaving your chair. And it works with the cameras that are already installed: a proper control room does not start by replacing them.
At a glance
What it can do
A layout that fits you
Pick the grid shape from twenty, up to 64 images on one screen, or place each tile by hand wherever it suits you. Add more cameras than the shape holds and the grid grows by itself instead of dropping the last one.
A tile is not only video
A tile takes ten kinds of content: the map, the building floor plan, the panel of open incidents, a clock with that site's local time, text or video. And from the map you click a pin and that camera drops into the layout.
Your usual screen, one click away
Save a whole layout under a name and it comes back identical tomorrow, from any workstation. Share it with whoever you choose, and give it a schedule: outside its hours that view is simply not available.
Tours that run themselves
Chain scenes together and the wall moves from one to the next with nobody touching it: up to 20 tours of 64 steps, holding anything from two seconds to an hour. The day scene comes up on time, and so does the night one.
The wall, from your desk
Drag a camera onto the thumbnail of the wall and it shows up on the room's wall. You can also fill it in one go with the cameras of a zone: it tells you how many went in and how many did not fit.
Screens with no password, but with a key
The television in a reception area cannot type a password, so the wall is published as a link. That link carries a PIN, an expiry date and a list of allowed network addresses, and you can rotate or revoke it whenever you want.
Several operators, one set of controls
Everyone sees who is watching the wall and who is in charge of it. There are four priority ranks: control only passes to someone of equal or higher rank, the operator who loses it is told there and then, and the handover is logged with a name and a time.
What the AI sees, drawn on the picture
Boxes, zones, counting lines, occupancy, speed and number plates are drawn over the video. Each operator switches the layers they want on and off, and that changes nothing of what the system keeps measuring and storing. The filter is remembered per person and per camera: tomorrow, from another desk, it is still set.
One 360° camera, four framings
A single camera on the ceiling covers what four would, and its round image is straightened out in the browser itself: panorama, magnifier or four views at once. The operator zooms into the part that matters without moving anything, and the tile itself points out that the camera has not turned: what moves is the zoom.
Cycles of whole walls on one screen
A dedicated screen chains up to 32 different walls, each held from five seconds to an hour. You start it by pasting a link into its browser, and after four seconds without input the controls and the cursor disappear: what is left is the picture and nothing else.
Rewind the whole wall, not one camera
One set of controls takes every tile back to the same moment, up to twenty-four hours ago, at half speed or four times speed, with ten- and sixty-second jumps. Tiles with no recording for that moment are marked as such instead of going black, and returning to live is immediate.
You know whether the screen is alive
Every screen on the wall reports that it is alive and says which version of the layout it is showing. At a glance you can tell whether the television in the room is off, disconnected or still showing yesterday's, which matters as much as a camera going down with nobody noticing until it is needed.
The control room
Nobody has one monitor per camera
An installation always grows the same way: cameras get added, screens do not. In the end there are hundreds of cameras and a wall with eight or twelve slots, and the operator's job is no longer watching, it is choosing. Choosing badly is expensive, because what is not on screen is seen by nobody. And when every layout is built by hand, a shift starts with fifteen minutes of placing cameras and ends with a wall nobody remembers the state of. That is where a control room loses its time: not on video, on arranging it.
With IRIS a layout is saved under its name and comes back with one click, the same tomorrow as in a year's time, from any workstation. It is shared with the right people and can be given a schedule, so a view is only available during the hours when it makes sense. Tours chain scenes that rotate on their own, from two seconds to an hour per step, so ten sites get covered from a single screen. There are also rules that work with nobody in front of them: the day scene comes up on time and so does the night one, and when an incident fires, the camera involved appears in the reserved tile and steps back out by itself seconds later. An incident can even take over the whole wall and hand it back exactly as it was. Nobody has to remember how it was arranged.
The room's wall is driven from the workstation: drag a camera onto a thumbnail and it appears on the wall. Several people can be watching the same wall, but only one is in charge: you see who has control, the handover is requested, and whoever loses it is told there and then. Screens with no user of their own — a reception television, the display in a meeting room — open a published link, protected by a PIN, an expiry date and a list of allowed addresses, with every failed attempt counted. All of it travels over a single secure port, 443, the same one any web page uses: for the network team that is thirteen firewall rules nobody has to request, justify or maintain, and there is nothing to install on each desk. And it works with no internet, because the maps and the models live inside the customer's own installation: not one image goes out to a third party.
Watching is not worth much if you then have to switch to another program. From the tile itself you move a motorised camera, replay the last thirty seconds, open an incident with that camera already attached as context, or export an evidence sheet with its chain-of-custody fingerprint. And the screen never lies in its own favour: when a tile cannot give live video because the limit on simultaneous streams has been reached, it drops to a refreshing still image and says so, instead of going black. When the button that moves a camera is off, it distinguishes 'this camera is fixed', 'I could not check' and 'you do not have permission', because those are not the same thing. Viewing, moving and configuring are separate permissions, and privacy-masked areas cannot be lifted from a view: it takes a written reason, a limited duration and, if the organisation requires it, a supervisor's approval. Every viewing is logged: who watched which camera, at what point in the video, and from where.
Four hundred cameras and twelve screens is not fixed by buying more screens. It is fixed by deciding well, and deciding once: the morning view, the night-shift tour, the lobby wall. Templates hold the design of a wall and apply it to any other in one click; they hold the shape and the tiles, but never the wall's name, its public link or its permissions, because a template is design, not identity. Auto-fill loads a whole wall with the cameras of a zone, in order, and tells you how many went in and how many did not fit. And with attention focus switched on, the camera of an open incident walks into the layout by itself and steps out when the incident is closed, with a few seconds of grace so it does not flicker in and out. That is why a control room stops rebuilding its setup every week.
A wall is judged in the demo, so every tile declares its own numbers: how many frames a second it is really giving — measured in the browser, not declared by anyone — how much bandwidth it takes, whether it is recording right now or merely set up to record, and on which server. When there is no number, no zero is painted: it says whether it is measuring, whether there is no live feed, no data at all, or the camera is off, because a measured zero and a missing measurement are not the same thing. Every viewing session also stores the resolution and smoothness observed, the packet loss and the round-trip delay, so you can check camera by camera whether what arrives is what the specification promised. That answers questions that usually have no answer: which sites have a bad network, which cameras give less than they claim, and how many minutes of video get watched per shift. And all of it can be driven without a mouse: arrow keys move the selection, one key changes the grid shape and another opens the camera search.
The figures
Counted, not estimated
- 433live and wall options, counted one by one
- 64cameras on a single wall screen
- 20grid shapes, plus the one you draw yourself
- 10kinds of content that fit in one tile
- 32different walls one screen can chain together
- 8shapes for marking zones and lines on the picture
Questions
Do we need new cameras to get a video wall like this?
No. IRIS works with the cameras that are already installed, and the operator drives everything from the browser, with no program to install on each desk. What changes is not the hardware out on the poles: it is that the layout is built in two clicks, saved, and comes back identical tomorrow, and that the room's wall is driven from the desk.
How many cameras fit on one screen at once?
Up to 64 tiles per screen, with twenty grid shapes or free placement by hand. Separately there is a limit, configurable per server, on how many of those tiles carry live video at once, so neither the workstation nor the network is choked. Tiles beyond that limit do not go black: they show a refreshing still image, and the tile itself says this is a system decision and not a fault.
Who can see each camera, and is there a record of who watched?
Viewing, moving and configuring are separate permissions, and on top of that each camera can have its own access list, person by person. Privacy-masked areas cannot be uncovered from a view: it takes a written reason, a limited duration and, where the organisation requires it, a supervisor's approval. And yes, there is a record: every viewing, every camera movement, every unmasking and every access to a published wall is logged with who, when, from where and by which route.
A tile stops showing video. How do I know if it is a fault or a decision?
Because the tile says so. IRIS tells three reasons apart and names them: the limit on simultaneous live video has been reached — a decision of the system, not a fault — the camera is down, or the stream has stalled. In the first case the tile switches to a refreshing still image and stays useful; in the other two it reconnects by itself and says so while it does. An operator can also insist that their tiles never fall back to a still image. And if a tile is black because you have no access to that camera, it says that too: a black square with no explanation is the worst possible answer in a control room.
What does it actually take to set up a wall of screens?
A screen with a browser — a television, a monitor or a video cube — and its connection to the server over the same secure port as everything else. Nothing to install on that screen and no configuration file to edit: the shape of the wall, the content of each tile, the bezel compensation and even the scrolling text bar are all set from the web interface. The screen opens the published link without typing a password, and that link carries a PIN, an expiry date and a list of allowed addresses. What you do need is the one thing no vendor sells: deciding what gets seen. That part is the control room's work, and everything else exists so that it only has to be done once.
The real interface, step by step
You set the rule once. IRIS applies it every time.
You will see a summary of the interface, played step by step and hands-free. Each round starts with another case. The complete tool does not fit in a demo.
- Four cameras at once
- Each understands its own view
- The numbers climb by themselves
Next step
When does a bad review get decided?
15 cases: 11 raise an alert when something happens and 4 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
Who is watching a whole quay at three in the morning?
14 cases: 13 raise an alert when something happens and 1 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
And the best part
Nobody was hired to stare at a screen.They were hired to know what to do.
Watching is what a machine does best; deciding is what only a person does. IRIS watches all four thousand at once and hands over only what calls for a decision.
Tell us your problem and we will say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
We reply the same working day.