It's four am and it's your first day on your new job as night watchman at Acme, Inc. You hear a sound that sounds like it's coming from the dumpsters out back but you're not sure. Your heart starts to pound through your chest. You pause for a moment wondering what caused it. Thinking on your feet, you pull out your Pocket PC and start up Axis Camera Explorer. You select the camera that shows the dumpster out back and see that you've got a friendly raccoon who's doing a little bit of dumpster diving looking for the scraps of pizza you had earlier in the evening.
Axis Communications (www.axis.com) makes a complete line of network-attached cameras that are widely deployed in the security market. Their cameras feature recording options that include motion detection which uses shifts in the image or an external motion detector to trigger the recording. Images captured during the motion can be uploaded to an FTP server, or e-mailed to you.
Controlling cameras remotely with a Pocket PC
Until the release of Axis Camera Explorer (ACE) for the Pocket PC, you couldn't effectively view the cameras from your Pocket PC. You could do it by using Microsoft Terminal Services to view a PC displaying the output of a camera. But that is a very impractical way of watching the camera. The imaginary scenario described in the first paragraph is the reason why this capability is important. A smaller facility may only have one guard, who can't keep running back to the security office to look at a monitor.
An installation wizard makes it easy to install ACE on your Pocket PC. Once the physical camera has been installed on your network, adding it to Axis Camera Explorer is a snap. Start Camera Explorer from the Programs menu, select Camera> New Camera from the menu, and enter the basic camera information including its name and its IP address. Once you press OK you're ready to view the output by double-tapping the camera you want to view. The Axis 2120 camera that I used was recognized as an AXIS 2120 camera when I selected it. Screen 1 shows what I saw when I selected the camera to view it.
Screen 1: My very messy office viewed through a wall-mounted camera using Axis Camera Manager.
Screen 2: A view of downtown Manhattan from a Pocket PC with the help of Axis Camera Manager
ACE lets you group and organize network cameras and video servers for easy access. You can view live images from an unlimited number of Axis cameras or video servers simultaneously on a Pocket PC 2002. ACE can be preset to automatically switch between network cameras to monitor a large number of sites. Images can be quickly and easily rotated and scaled to take advantage of the full Pocket PC display. Finally, ACE lets you create direct links in a Web site to display live images from Axis cameras.
When used with a Pocket PC equipped with a wireless LAN card the Axis Camera Explorer for the Pocket PC can be a great tool to allow you to see what's happening anywhere in the facility, from anywhere in the facility.
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