Overview

Let’s say that you wanted to protect the items laying out on a table in a period room and know at any time if someone–visitor, contractor, docent, employee–removes something. You could put a camera high up on the wall or ceiling aiming down at the tabletop and use the on-screen motion detection feature of most systems to alert you. lf the camera is one of the very small sub-miniature cameras it would be nearly invisible and if it is skillfully designed it can be done with minimal impact on historic fabric.
Such alarming is accomplished by using a draw tool and drawing an etch-a-sketch box around the table top. Most systems allow you to draw several boxes. But the Acuity-vct allows you to draw an unlimited number of these boxes.This means that you can alarm each and every spoon, plate or other item on the table. Even a thimble.

Why not just draw one big box around the contents of the tabletop? Because in the real world you want your docent or interpreter to be able to actually reach into the table and point to specific items during the interpretation and this would cause a false alarm. By using the advanced analytic features of the Acuity-vct system this problem is solved by the sheer power ofthe software which lets you protect each and every item separately.

And with other systems such outside stimulus such as a reflection on the tabletop from the visitors themselves or the interpreter could easily set off a false alarm but with Acuity-vct these can be filtered out by the computer’s intelligence.
If your objective is to just keep visitors from crossing the velvet rope and entering the room, this is even easier Install the camera over the door and out of view of the visitors, activate the motion detection features, and any movement will be detected. With infrared cameras the Acuity-vct can even work in total darkness The Acuity-vct can integrate via an output to an input on your alarm system and call the police or it can simply trip a pager and alert the guard who may be on patrols elsewhere and alert him to respond.

These is just some of many examples of how the Acuity-vct brings greater capabilities and higher reliability to the protection of historic house museums and period room displays in museums.