The region’s biggest rainstorm in seven years slammed Orange County in January of this year, flooding roads, triggering mudslides, submerging vehicles and causing dozens of traffic accidents. The series of torrential downpours prompted the Santa Ana Police Department to activate its Emergency Operations Center. The Emergency Operations Center is part of the SAPD’s Homeland Security Division, but works with Orange County Fire Authority, Orange County’s Emergency Management Division, Santa Ana Unified School District, the American Red Cross, and other departments and agencies in surrounding cities to provide the highest level of preparedness and coordination when disaster strikes. Keeping Santa Ana safe requires shared visibility of common areas and high-profile critical infrastructure locations such as transit, energy and public utilities.
 
The SAPD Emergency Operations Center morphed from two main workstations in separate offices displaying surveillance system cameras on four large screens primarily designed to monitor the perimeter of the Police Administration Building to a Hiperwall-driven command center with nine 55-inch NEC, thin bezel, commercial-grade displays. The SAPD did not have a “true” video wall or visualization system in place prior to installing a Hiperwall-driven system which includes IP cameras, an enterprise-class network management system and a new fiber-optic backbone. 
 
Knowing they needed a level of preparedness for potential disasters, the SAPD began reviewing LED video wall solutions for a command center. The SAPD ultimately chose Hiperwall because it was designed specifically for large display surfaces – it was a true visualization system. But more importantly, it gave the SAPD the centralized capability for displaying infinite data sources that could be viewed and managed effectively and easily. The Hiperwall visualization solution allows the Emergency Operations Center to receive any number of feeds from the 300-plus city-wide cameras, display the SAPD CAD system, National Weather Service satellite imagery, several social media channels, helicopter downlink video, SAPD video cameras, local news and much more.
 
In addition, their visualization system includes video content analytics to detect policy driven situations such as motion in restricted areas, loitering, overcrowding in public places, and more. Hiperwall seamlessly integrates access control and physical security systems allowing alarms and programmed events to be jointly managed.  
 
During the winter storm, the SAPD Emergency Operations Center powered by Hiperwall became the command and control room video wall for the city’s agencies to monitor the city-wide cameras, satellite weather changes in real-time, city maps from Google Earth to view flood damage, traffic accidents, 911 calls, fire/EMS, and public works. All three city departments were in the Emergency Operations Center using the Hiperwall visualization system to collaborate which allowed them to be more efficient in resource management, triage calls and managing response times during the storm.
 
After discovering Hiperwall with all its capabilities, the SAPD stopped evaluating other video wall systems. Not only was Hiperwall an advanced visualization solution, it provided the SAPD the latest in technology and best practices for their Emergency Operations Center. It gave them a cost-effective solution that will grow with them. The Hiperwall software-centric solution requires only ordinary PCs, monitors, and a standard Ethernet network making Hiperwall a more affordable visualization system than traditional video wall technology. It’s ease of operation also expedited the training process, which effectively reduced manpower and operational costs.  
 
Having a single location to gather and share information with those in the field and make risk mitigating decisions keeps the Santa Ana community safe. The incident will always dictate the necessary feeds and data requirements, but the SAPD is now prepared with their Hiperwall-driven Emergency Operations Center to manage or co-manage any situation.

 

The name Hiperwall is spelled in an unusual way, and that needs some explanation. Since the name isn’t spelled with a Y (as in “hyper”), the initial assumption by most people is that it is a play on High Performance, which is almost, but not exactly, right.

Hiperwall started as a research project at UC Irvine to build the world’s highest resolution (at the time) tiled display wall, more commonly known as a video wall. It was built to enable scientific visualization on an unprecedented scale, and we regularly showed imagery and data sets that measured hundreds of millions of pixels and gigabytes of data. From the start, we designed the system to be highly interactive and flexible, and we used parallel and distributed computing techniques to provide the high-performance visualization required to drive a 200 million pixel display system. Therefore, the name Hiperwall is an acronym of Highly Interactive Parallelized display Wall (yes, liberties were taken for the sake of readability).

At the time, we capitalized the name as HIPerWall, and we highlighted the IP in the name for two reasons. We used industry-standard Internet Protocol (IP) as the basis for our distributed computing infrastructure. We were also loosely affiliated with the OptIPuter project led by Prof. Larry Smarr of UCSD. Note that the IP in OptIPuter is also capitalized, because it was an IP-based worldwide distributed computing research project.

The Hiperwall name was chosen because we valued user interactivity and built the software to be highly interactive with very powerful rendering capability. This is easily visible in the video below that shows how smoothly and easily a Hiperwall system can zoom in on a 2 billion pixel image (rendered from a video game, Witcher 3).



How valuable is this interactivity to our customers? Many of our customers design their content using our interactive interface, but then they save that layout (we call it an Environment), so they do not use our highly interactive features on a daily basis. Where interactivity becomes essential is when a crisis arises or new information from a new source needs to be displayed urgently. Because our software is designed for easy interactivity, a system operator can quickly place the new source or image anywhere on the wall and even replicate it to multiple walls. Because of the interactive design features built into Hiperwall software, the ability to manipulate content quickly and easily is ready when our customers need it.