Solutions by typeMobility analysis
How many people come in through each door, and when?
You know how many came in. Not where.
Saturday, ten past six in the evening. The mall forecourt has two doors. Through the big glass one, a stream that never breaks. Through the small one on the left, almost nobody: two people in ten minutes. Inside, the units facing that door have been empty all afternoon. At closing time the centre will have one figure: how many came in. One figure, for the whole building.
8 cameras across 7 sectors
This is how you ask for it
«Tell me how many people come in through each door and when, and alert me if one stops counting while the centre is open.»
That figure does not help much. A total at closing time cannot tell you whether the small door is dead all day or only on Saturdays, or whether the left-hand mall fills up when the bus arrives. And those two things drive decisions that cost money: where the promotion goes, how many staff each shift needs, what rent a unit can carry and which one is being overpaid.
You decide once
You decide this once. You say where the counting line goes on each door, which way counts as in, what the opening hours are and how long without a count should trigger an alert. IRIS draws the number every day, on every door and every shift, with nobody having to remember to look. If a new door opens, you add its line and everything else stays as it was.
Counting is not something you ask IRIS for in a sentence. A line cannot be described in words: it has to be drawn. So this camera is not set up by saying what to look for, but by drawing where people walk. You trace a line across each doorway, you say which way counts as coming in, and from then on the number is always the same number: repeatable, comparable from one Saturday to the next, and auditable if anyone questions it.
That changes the conversation. Saturday stops being «it was busy» and becomes two curves: the big door climbing from eleven, the small one flat all afternoon. Whoever negotiates a unit’s rent no longer argues from impressions, they show the footfall past that door hour by hour. And the floor manager finds out that the peak hour is not the one they assumed, and moves staff where they are actually needed.
The alert comes after, and it is simple. If a door stops counting people while the centre is open, it almost never means nobody is coming: it means the door is shut, or the lift beside it has stopped, or building work is blocking the way. That used to show up in a report on Monday. Now it shows up while it is happening, when the door can still be opened.
What changes
Before, someone stood with a hand clicker two days a year and the rest was an estimate. Or you looked at average spend and assumed the rest. Now footfall through every door is counted every day and every hour, with nobody counting anything. Whoever builds the Saturday rota looks at last week’s curve instead of remembering how it went.
Where we have seen it
CAM-590Two thousand four hundred pass, two hundred and sixty stop
«Tell me if footfall past the unit rises for two hours running and the number of people stopping does not rise with it.»
CAM-144Someone climbs the gate onto the dam crest
«Tell me the moment anyone climbs over the fence onto the crest, at any hour, and tell me which camera and where they got in.»
CAM-535How many people come in through each door, and when
«Tell me if one of the two doors stops adding people while the centre is open.»
CAM-387A truck coming head-on down the wrong lane
«Tell me the moment a truck enters the haul road the wrong way, and show me where it came in.»
CAM-110A drone over the wall
«Tell me if something appears flying over the wall or the yard, and tell me where it came in and which way it is heading.»
CAM-69Slip roads in and out
«Tell me if a vehicle stops inside the hatched area or if someone enters by the exit the wrong way.»
CAM-57Someone climbing the site fence
«Tell me if someone climbs the fence or gets in where nobody is meant to, whatever time it is, and show me the camera so I know where they came through.»
CAM-540How many get out of the car and which door they end up using
«Tell me how many people come in through the main door for each car that arrives at the car park.»
What it does not do
This counts people, not customers. IRIS does not know who comes in, does not recognise faces and cannot tell that the same person came in twice: that is two crossings. It does not know whether the person crossing the line came to shop or to cut through to the car park, and it will not know. The number says how many went past. What that footfall is worth is a business call, not a camera’s.
Questions
- Does this identify the people coming in?
- No. IRIS does not recognise faces, keeps no record of anyone and does not know whether the person crossing the line has been there before. What it does is add one when someone crosses in the entry direction and subtract one when they cross the other way. All that comes out is a number per hour and per door. If the same person goes in and out three times, the counter sees three crossings, not one repeated person: you need to know that when reading the figure, which is why we say it before you ask.
- Why draw a line instead of just asking for it in a sentence?
- Because a line cannot be described in words. Asking is for finding; counting is for measuring, and they are not done the same way. If you say «count the people coming in the main entrance», nobody knows where the main entrance begins or at exactly what point someone counts as having entered. Drawing the line on the image fixes it for good, and that is why the number can be repeated tomorrow, compared with last Saturday and defended in front of whoever audits it.
- Is the figure any use for negotiating a unit’s rent?
- Yes, and it is one of the most requested uses. Footfall past a door, counted hour by hour and day by day, is the figure you argue value with. It stops being the landlord’s opinion against the tenant’s. The same line shows whether footfall rises during a campaign and whether the people who stop rise with it, which does not always happen: there are malls where plenty walk past and nobody stops. That contrast is what decides it.
- What if we open a new door or move an entrance?
- You draw another line and it is counting. No turnstiles, no floor mats, no sensors in the frame: the count comes from the camera already looking at that spot. If a door closes for building work, its curve goes to zero, and that is the signal that something is up, not a fault. And if the entrance moves three metres, you move the line. What you cannot do is move it every week and then compare months: the line moves rarely, because its whole value is that it does not move.
Demo · IRIS at work
We won't just tell you. We'll show you.
It is a summary of the real screen: it plays by itself, step by step, and shows only the path of one case. The actual tool has far more than fits in here.
- The alert fires
- It lands in the tray
- You open it
- You confirm or dismiss
Not seeing yours here?
These words are the ones we have built, not the ones IRIS understands. The list falls short on purpose: you ask for it in a sentence, and sentences do not run out. Tell us what is in front of your cameras and we will tell you whether it understands it, or not yet.
And the best part
By the eighth hour of a shiftnobody watches the way they did in the first. That is not a flaw.
It is 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 will say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
We reply the same working day.