The core feature of the Niō-iDter system is that all authorized users receive notifications of events, can access the Niō and watch its view live, and can review automatically recorded videos of intrusions.

These are recent views from these cameras, and these too show the most recently active Niōs, and rotate the views among all available Niō units. You can thus monitor a large number of cameras hands-free - the system refreshes the screen automatically. All images and recordings are time-stamped, allowing users to know when events happened or how recent the images are.  Note that one of the units in the view is dark, thus informing the user the unit is offline. (If the unit is permanently offline, it can be deleted from the views).

By clicking the two sided expansion arrow, you can watch nine views rather than six.

The Three Types of Views

The Niōs shown can be rearranged using View Options. The grid view shown above can be arranged by title or by activity, and a set of them can be filtered out. You can choose to look more closely at a particular Niō by going to the focus view. Here, the Niō will be surrounded by others in its vicinity, which in turn can become the focus by a single tap. Finally, the live view provides real time communication with the venue. Alternatively, one can enter these two views by successive taps from the grid view.

Benefits of the Focus View

The focus view, described above, is a convenient way to monitor a few Niōs, perhaps all those at one site where a Niō detected some activity. By tapping on others around the main Niō, you can quickly see the others, and tap again to access their live view.

The focus view offers some useful quick short-cuts. From here, it is easy to play a voice down message, raise an alert, or operate the lights (these operations are available with the live view as well, and are described there).

Benefits of the Live View

The live view allows for a live push-to-talk conversation with the intruder. As part of the iDter service, this feature may be used by iDter personnel to engage with an intruder, as previously instructed by the security agency. In addition to raising an alert and playing a voice down, like in the focus view, here you can also sound the siren.

In addition, from here or in the focus view, you can turn on the lights  (useful if they were not already scheduled to be on), or the strobes (which can deter effectively), or start a manual recording (if one was not started automatically already). Note that these features are also available from Niō and Settings --> Sector --> Company→ Camera; that screen has a recent view.

Finally, there is a very important feature here - the ability for managers to temporarily snooze the system. This can be very useful in situations where the intrusion turns out to be harmless and will last a while (such as an unexpected delivery). Snoozing the system will temporarily disable the deterrence and recording features. To avoid forgetfully snoozing the system for too long, the system requires the wake up time to be specified whenever a snooze is initiated.

Events Review

Tapping See All in the main Views tab brings up all the recordings, sorted in order of time (most recent first). It is easy to filter these just by the Niōs of interest, or, by tapping Filters on this screen, to jump to recordings at a particular time.

Most of the recordings will be automatically created, when intrusions are detected; it is also possible that a few were manually triggered. Recordings in progress are indicated by a lightning icon, and there is information about the length of the recording, and whether the intrusion was by a person or a vehicle.

In addition to these, Recap videos are generated thrice a day at specific times. These time lapse videos allow you to quickly review the entire day at the Niō. Upon such a review, or if you otherwise have the need to look at events at a particular time, it is easy to retrieve a 5 or 15 minute video at that time from the SD card installed on the device. The storage capacity of the SD card determines how far back an event can be fetched. The resolution of this video will be identical to that of the other recordings, and is set for the Niō  in Settings.

Playing Recordings

Watching a recording is easy - simply tapping on it will bring up the recording and start to play. Since all  recordings automatically include a ‘pre-roll’, i.e. some time before the actual event to set the context, the player is set to skip forward to a suitable starting point, for convenience. Standard video player controls are available - to play 2x or 3x as fast, pause, skip ahead, play in a loop, etc. 

There are two additional useful features. First, one can raise an alert from the recording - this will send a notification to all authorized watchers of this Niō, and tapping on this notification will play the recording for them on their app. Second, the usual Share mechanism allows a user to download the recording and attach to an email. Soon, there will be a way to send links to the recordings that can be used independently of the app.

Real-Time Notifications

As events occur, automated notifications can be sent to all authorized users of the system. By default however, this option is turned off. Instead, notifications are triggered by the iDter live monitoring team when an event is determined to be a true intrusion. These video verified alerts are the default mechanism. Notifications free you from having to continually switch between units looking for events. Instead, they alert you when they happen.

These notifications also appear on a locked screen; so you do not have to be using the iPad at the time.