Vision and Cameras

Vision is ARC’s camera side: adding the cameras in your building, watching them live on a wall, hearing what’s happening in a room, and capturing Moments — photos and short clips from a session that you can hand to the team afterwards.

You set cameras up once at System → Vision, and everything else — a game’s camera wall, the Listen mixer on the control page, Moments — builds on that one list.

Turning Vision on

Vision unlocks in two stages, so it’s normal for the camera pages to appear one at a time rather than all at once.

1. Install the camera engine. Go to System → Overview, find Vision service in the list of built-in services, and open it. The panel is titled Vision — “Camera discovery, live monitoring, snapshots, Moments clips, and camera-audio streaming.” Press Install and let it finish.
2. Turn the feature on. Once it’s installed, the Enable feature switch becomes available. Flip it on.

With those two done, a Vision section appears under System. That is where you add cameras, and it works with none configured yet.

3. Add at least one camera. With zero cameras configured, Vision parks itself rather than idling in the background. Adding your first camera brings it fully to life — and only then does the Vision item appear in the main navigation, which is the full-screen Vision Wall.

The same panel is where you check on Vision later. It shows the installed version, whether an update is available, how many cameras are configured, CPU and memory use, overall health, and the streaming status. Check for updates looks for a newer camera engine, and Uninstall removes it again — you have to turn the feature off first, and a copy that shipped inside ARC can’t be removed here.

The one-time camera engine download

The camera engine is the piece that actually talks to your cameras and streams video to the browser. It’s a few hundred megabytes, so ARC keeps it out of the main installer and fetches it on demand.

The first time you open a camera page on a computer that doesn’t have it yet, you’ll see Set up cameras on this computer — “The camera engine needs to be downloaded before cameras can be used on this computer. It only takes a moment.” Press Set up cameras and wait. If it fails, ARC tells you plainly and offers Try again; the usual cause is the internet connection.

A few things worth knowing:

• It downloads once per computer. ARC keeps it in a folder that survives ARC updates, so a routine ARC patch doesn’t fetch it again.
• It’s versioned separately from ARC, so it only updates when the camera engine itself changes.
• Once it’s on disk, cameras run entirely on your local network. Nothing about live view or Moments depends on the internet afterwards.
• ARC picks it up within a few seconds. You don’t need to restart anything.

Adding a camera

From System → Vision, press Add camera. The Add Camera Wizard opens — “Find cameras on your network, connect them, and add them using the steps below.” There are two ways through it.

Find cameras on the network

This is the default path, and it’s the easy one if your cameras support ONVIF.

Press Scan network and ARC looks for ONVIF cameras on your local network. Each one it finds appears in a list with its Brand, Model, and Camera address, and a status of either Ready to add or Already added. Cameras you’ve already set up stay visible for reference but can’t be picked twice. There’s a search box and a filter for All cameras / Unadded cameras / Added cameras if the list gets long.

Tick the cameras you want, then continue to Authenticate. Most cameras won’t hand over their stream details until they know who’s asking, so enter the Username and Password and press Connect. ARC applies the same login to every camera you selected — handy when they were all set up with the same credentials. Anything that fails shows why (Invalid username or password, Couldn’t load camera profiles) and can be skipped so it doesn’t hold up the rest.

Add a camera by its address

If discovery doesn’t find a camera — or it isn’t an ONVIF camera at all — use Add manually: “Use a direct stream URL when discovery does not find the camera or you already know the exact source path.”

Here you supply the details yourself:

You’ll usually find the stream address in the camera’s own web page or its manual.

Set each camera up

Whichever path you took, the Configure cameras step gives you one card per camera with a live preview so you can confirm you’re looking at the right room. On each card:

• Camera name — name it after the room or the view, not the model number.
• Live view — Automatic, Best quality, or Lower bandwidth. Automatic picks for you; Lower bandwidth is a good move for a wall showing many cameras at once.
• Moments clip stream — Automatic, Same as live, Best quality, or Lower bandwidth. This is the stream ARC uses when it captures a clip.
• Game assignments (optional) — which rooms this camera belongs to. See below.

Finally, Overview and add shows a review table so you can check names, games, and stream choices before committing. Press Add camera and ARC creates them. Adding happens in the background, so you’ll see progress cards on the list afterwards — Queued, Adding, and, if something didn’t work, Needs attention with an invitation to reopen the wizard and retry.

Game assignments

Game assignments — “Choose where this camera appears.” — is the single most important field on a camera, because it decides far more than a filter.

Assigning a camera to a game:

• puts it in the Available cameras list on that game’s Cameras tab, ready to place on the wall;
• makes its microphone available in that game’s Listen mixer on the control page;
• lets that game’s automations capture Moments from it;
• groups it under that game on the camera list, and in the Filter by game menu.

A camera can belong to more than one game, and one that belongs to none shows under Unassigned.

The camera list

System → Vision is your camera directory — “Live monitoring, snapshots, Moments clips, and per-game camera walls.”

Along the top are tabs with counts for All, Online, Offline, Disabled, and Unassigned, plus a search box that matches on camera name, address, and the games a camera belongs to. Filter by game narrows the list to one room. Each row shows a thumbnail, the camera name, the games it’s assigned to, its recent activity, and whether it’s enabled.

The row menu gives you Edit camera, Disable or Enable, and Delete. Deleting asks for confirmation — “The camera will be removed from the camera directory. This cannot be undone.” Disabling is the gentler option when a camera is temporarily out of action: it drops off the walls and out of the Listen mixer without losing its setup.

Per-camera settings

Clicking a camera opens its panel. Apart from the connection details, everything here saves as you change it.

• Live preview — the camera as it looks right now, with Reload view and Check camera. Check camera re-inspects the source and fills in the Stream health facts: resolution, codec, frame rate, bitrate, and keyframe interval. Run it whenever a camera is behaving oddly.
• Identity — the Camera name, and an Enabled switch: “Turn off when this camera should not appear.”
• Address — where the camera lives. For cameras found by discovery, that’s an IP address field: “Update this when the camera moves to a new address on your network. Saving re-points the live feed automatically.” For manually added cameras, turn on Update source URL to replace the address. Update stored credentials reveals the username and password fields, and leaving them blank clears the saved login. Use Test connection to confirm before pressing Apply connection changes — this is the one section that needs an explicit save, because applying it re-checks the camera and restarts its stream. There’s also an Open camera page link out to the camera’s own web page.
• Streams — the same Live view and Moments clip stream choices as the wizard.
• Games — the Game assignments for this camera.
• Preset views — only on cameras that can pan, tilt, and zoom. See below.

Cameras that pan, tilt, and zoom

If a camera supports it, ARC shows a PTZ control pad — up, left, right, down, zoom in, zoom out, and stop — that sends short nudges to move the camera.

Once it’s pointed somewhere useful, Preset views saves that position by name: “Save the current pan, tilt, and zoom as a named view, then jump back to it from any monitor wall tile.” Give it a name like Front door or Final puzzle, press Save current view, and staff can Recall it later straight from the wall without leaving the game they’re running.

Snapshots

The live view has a Take snapshot button. It grabs the frame currently on screen and downloads it as an image file to whatever computer you’re browsing from. Snapshots are not filed anywhere inside ARC — they’re a one-off download, so save them somewhere you’ll find them again.

Saved camera views

A view is a named camera layout: which cameras appear, and where. Views power the full-screen Vision wall, and they’re shared by every computer in your business, so a layout built at the front desk is the same one the control room sees.

Open them with the Views button on the camera list, or Edit views from the wall itself. The page is titled Camera views — “Build and save named camera layouts for the monitor page.”

• New view creates one; you can Rename and Delete views from the same rail.
• Drag cameras from Available cameras onto the grid to place them, and resize a tile by its corner.
• Each view shows how many cameras it holds and its grid shape.
• Saving is deliberate: an Unsaved badge appears while you’re working, and leaving with unsaved work asks whether to Discard changes or Keep editing.

Good views are usually purpose-built: one for the front of house, one per floor, one for a busy Saturday when three rooms run at once.

Two different camera walls

ARC has two full-screen camera walls, and mixing them up causes a lot of confusion. They look similar and behave differently.

Both behave the same way once open: they’re chrome-free, the floating controls fade away after a couple of seconds of stillness and come back when you move the mouse, there’s a fullscreen toggle, and clicking a tile expands that camera to fill the screen (Back to wall returns you). A tile whose camera has gone missing reads Camera unavailable.

The Vision Wall picks its layout from a control in the floating overlay. The first option is always the built-in All cameras, which lays out every enabled camera automatically, sorted by name, up to sixteen tiles. Each computer remembers the view you last chose. If a view has no cameras in it yet, it tells you so and points you at Edit views.

The Camera Wall is designed to be left running unattended on a second screen next to the control page — it isn’t behind the staff sign-in for that reason. Its floating bar shows which game it’s on and lets you lock it to one room or let it follow whichever game staff are running.

Listen — hearing a room

If your cameras have microphones, staff can listen to a room while it runs.

The switch is a Listen checkbox on each camera in the game Editor’s Cameras tab: “This camera’s microphone appears in the control page Listen mixer, so staff can hear the room. Nothing streams until someone turns the channel on.”

It’s on by default. Every camera assigned to a game that actually has a microphone appears in that game’s mixer unless someone unticks it, so the usual job is turning off the ones you don’t want rather than switching on the ones you do. Cameras ARC knows have no audio don’t offer the checkbox at all.

Staff use it from the Listen control on the control page dock. Opening it shows one row per source — camera microphones and any room microphones side by side — each with an on/off toggle, a volume slider, a mute button, and a live level meter, plus a Master output section over the top. The control itself reads Listen, then Listening once something is playing.

Separately from the mixer, each tile on a game’s wall has its own speaker button and an Unmuted by default setting, so a wall can come up with the key camera already audible.

Moments

Moments is a collection of photos and short clips captured during a session — the jump scare, the big solve, the winning moment, a team photo at the end. Staff review them after the game and can download anything worth handing to the customers.

What triggers a capture

Moments are captured by automations, and only by automations. There is no “capture now” button anywhere in ARC. Someone building a game decides in the Editor exactly when a Moment should be taken — when an objective is solved, when the final door opens, when the team wins.

Two actions appear under Moments in the automation picker:

Both need a real session in progress. A System automation can’t capture a Moment, and neither can a game automation firing while no one is playing. The camera picker only offers cameras assigned to that game, and ARC checks again at the instant of capture that the camera is still enabled and still belongs to the game — so a leftover automation can’t quietly photograph another room.

Quality

Photos are pulled fresh from the camera at the moment of capture — ARC never substitutes an older preview frame — and are saved at the camera’s own resolution without shrinking them. Clips keep the camera’s own picture untouched where possible, and are converted only when the camera produces something browsers struggle to play. When you ask for audio, it’s included; when you don’t, the clip is silent.

Where staff see them

Once a session has captured at least one Moment, a Moments cell with a count appears in the information bar on the control page. Click it to open the collection for that session. Later captures appear as they happen without reloading the page, and the cell stays available after the game ends so staff can look through the collection before moving on.

The same collection is reachable afterwards from a session in Insights, next to that session’s outcome.

Inside the collection:

• Photos and clips appear in capture order as a grid of thumbnails, with the total count and size at the top.
• A capture still being made shows as Capture in progress…, and one that didn’t work shows Capture failed with a plain reason, such as the camera being disabled or not responding in time.
• Each item has Download and Delete. Delete asks you to press again to confirm.
• Clicking a thumbnail opens it full size with Previous and Next arrows. Clips have their own play and mute controls and never start on their own — staff press play. A Details popover shows the camera, when it was captured, how long it runs, its size, and whether audio is included.

Moments settings

Where Moments are kept and how long they last is set once for the whole business, at System → Overview → Moments — “Choose where session photos and clips are kept and how long ARC retains them.”

A fixed note on the panel makes one more guarantee: “ARC still pauses captures before the selected storage volume becomes critically low.” You can’t fill a disk with Moments and take the rest of ARC down with it.

A few details that matter in practice:

• Retention is measured from when the session started, not per file, so everything from one customer’s game expires together. Cleanup runs when ARC starts and then daily. Forever switches age-based cleanup off entirely.
• Lowering the total storage limit doesn’t delete anything immediately. It takes effect at the next capture or the next daily sweep. Captures are never blocked by the size limit — ARC just trims older sessions to make room.
• Changing the storage location only affects future captures. ARC doesn’t move what’s already there, and older items keep working normally.
• Only one capture per camera runs at a time, whatever the concurrency setting says. If a camera is already capturing and another automation asks it for something, the newer request is dropped rather than queued — worth remembering if you write two automations that could fire together.
• The Choose folder button opens a folder picker on the computer running ARC, not on the computer you’re browsing from. If you’re setting this up remotely, type or paste the network path instead.

Where to go next

• The Editor’s Cameras tab — lay out a game’s camera wall, set tile framing, and link a camera to an objective.
• Automations and scenes — build the automation that captures a Moment.
• Running a game — where staff open the wall, listen in, and review Moments.
• The Overview page — where the Vision and Moments panels live.
• Raspberry Pi and Windows Bridge — room microphones, which share the Listen mixer with your cameras.