SURVEILLANCE IS FUN!

Being Big Brother can be such a drag, star­ing at walls of black-​​and-​​white secu­rity mon­i­tors all day. It’s a one-​​way trip to napville. And it doesn’t exactly make for tight secu­rity, either. One per­son can only watch six to eight sur­veil­lance screens for about twenty min­utes before every­thing goes blurry, accord­ing to the watcher’s rule of thumb.
An Atlanta start-​​up, Vistascape, has been liven­ing things up for mon­i­tor jock­eys, with a bowl full of eye candy, to keep them engaged in what they’re doing. Screen banks are replaced with a sin­gle, 3D-​​view of a facil­ity that lets a secu­rity offi­cer “fly” around the area from his desk­top, and focus on a sin­gle intruder. The U.S. Navy, the port of Corpus Christi, and sev­eral pri­vate energy com­pa­nies are all using the sys­tem. About 20 other instal­la­tions includ­ing Boston’s Logan Airport — are sched­uled to get in on the fun soon. My arti­cle in this month’s Wired mag­a­zine has an exam­ple of how it works.
THERE’S MORE: Patrick Di Justo has a hot arti­cle in today’s Times on the dan­gers of unse­cured web­cams. Teenagers in panties are mentioned.

February 24th, 2005 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.