Venue Manager

Access

Getting access

Venue Manager runs on our server. There is nothing to install and nothing to keep updated — you open a link in a browser and the app is there, always the current version, with the venue data your team shares.

Your link

Why nobody else can open it

The site is closed with a client certificate. Before a single byte of the app is served, our web server checks that your browser holds a certificate issued by us; a visitor without one is refused at the door and never even sees a login page. That is stronger than a password: there is nothing to guess, nothing to phish, and nothing to leak in someone else's data breach. All traffic is encrypted — a certificate can be revoked on its own without disturbing anyone else.

What you were given

The folder shared with you contains a .p12 file — that is your certificate, together with its private key. Load it into the device you want to browse from, once, and the site simply opens from then on. The next section has the steps for every platform.

The file is personal: treat it like a key, not like a document. Keep the password you were given with it, don't forward it on, and tell us if a device holding it is lost so we can revoke that certificate and issue a new one.

Setup · once per device

Installing your certificate

Loading the .p12 file into your browser or device takes about a minute. You will need the file and its password. Afterwards, the site asks you once per session which certificate to use — pick yours and continue.

Windows

For Edge and Chrome, which use the Windows certificate store:

1. Double-click the .p12 file. The Certificate Import Wizard opens.
2. Choose Current User as the store location, then Next twice.
3. Type the password you were given. Leave the default options ticked and press Next.
4. Leave Automatically select the certificate store selected, press Next, then Finish.
5. Restart the browser and open the link. Choose your certificate when Windows asks.

Firefox keeps its own certificate store, so it needs a separate import: Settings → Privacy & Security → scroll to Certificates → View Certificates… → tab Your Certificates → Import… → select the file and enter the password.

macOS

1. Double-click the .p12 file — Keychain Access opens.
2. Choose the login keychain and confirm.
3. Enter the password that came with the file.
4. The certificate appears under My Certificates. Safari and Chrome use it immediately.
5. Open the link and choose your certificate when macOS asks; approve with your Mac password or Touch ID, and pick Always Allow so you aren't asked every time.

Firefox on macOS needs its own import, exactly as described under Windows.

Linux

Chrome / Chromium:

1. Open Settings → Privacy and security → Security → Manage certificates.
2. Go to the Your certificates tab and press Import.
3. Select the .p12 file and enter its password.
4. Restart the browser and open the link.

If the import button does nothing, the system certificate tools are missing — install libnss3-tools (Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libnss3-tools) and try again.

Firefox: Settings → Privacy & Security → Certificates → View Certificates… → Your Certificates → Import….

iPhone & iPad

1. Save the .p12 file to the device — AirDrop it, mail it to yourself, or download it into the Files app.
2. Tap the file. iOS reports Profile Downloaded.
3. Open Settings. The downloaded profile appears near the top — or find it under General → VPN & Device Management.
4. Tap the profile, then Install, and enter your device passcode.
5. Enter the password that came with the certificate, then Install again to confirm.
6. Open the link in Safari and choose your certificate when asked.

Android

1. Copy the .p12 file onto the phone (Files, Downloads, Drive — anywhere you can browse to).
2. Open Settings and search for Install a certificate — on most phones it sits under Security & privacy → More security settings → Encryption & credentials.
3. Choose VPN & app user certificate.
4. Pick the .p12 file and enter its password.
5. Give it a name you will recognise, such as Venue Manager, and confirm.
6. Open the link in Chrome and select that certificate when prompted.

Android only stores certificates on a phone that has a screen lock. If it refuses, set a PIN, pattern or password first, then repeat the steps. Wording differs a little between manufacturers — searching the Settings app for certificate is the shortcut.

Overview

What the app is

A single, always-current picture of the hardware in a physical space — held inside a 3D model of that space, so location is never a guess and never a spreadsheet column.

Venue Manager opens on a 3D model of your room. Floating in it are the things you actually installed: cameras, small computers, network switches, wall ports, cable runs. Each one is a record you can open, edit, annotate, connect to others and colour by its state. Because everything sits in real coordinates, the app can answer spatial questions no inventory list can — which cameras see this spot, where that cable physically goes, what is mounted behind that beam.

Three kinds of work live here, and most teams use one more than the others:

Planning and verifying camera coverage

Paint the room with what your cameras can actually see — accounting for walls, beams and objects that block the view — and find the blind spots before someone finds them on site.

Watching a live tracking system

Show objects your on-site tracker is following, moving in real time inside the same 3D room, so what the tracker thinks and what the room looks like can be compared side by side.

Documenting the installation

The quiet one that pays for itself six months later: what is installed, where, plugged into what, with which serial, and what the person who installed it wanted you to know about it.

Home page

Venues & the home page

A venue is one physical space with its own 3D model. The home page lists all of them; everything else happens inside one.

Opening the app shows the venue list. Each card is a space — a hall, a room, a floor — and clicking it loads that venue's 3D model along with everything recorded in it. Hardware, connections and notes belong to one venue; object types and colour rules are shared across all of them, so a "camera" means the same thing everywhere.

Your two venues

Experimenta's instance arrives with both spaces already set up: Dome and Theater. Each carries its own 3D model of the room and its full camera rig — imported, placed and calibrated — so coverage works on the first visit, with nothing to configure. Open either from the home page and start looking around.

Adding a venue

The Add venue form takes a name and a 3D model file of the room (a .glb file, exported from your 3D software). Submit it and the venue is created and opened immediately, ready to be filled in. Nothing about your hardware is read from the model file — the model provides walls, floors and structure; everything else you record yourself.

Renaming, re-modelling and deleting

The Edit venues toggle above the list keeps destructive actions out of reach until you ask for them. With it on, each venue gains three actions:

• Rename — an inline field; nothing else about the venue moves.
• Replace model — swap in a newly exported room model while keeping every object, connection, note, camera calibration and saved graph layout. Use it when the building changed but your inventory didn't. The new model must use the same origin and scale as the old one, or the objects will no longer line up with the room.
• Delete — lists exactly what will be destroyed and requires you to type the venue's name before the button becomes active. A recovery snapshot of the venue's contents is written before anything is removed.

3D view

The 3D view

You fly through the room rather than orbit it — the same way you would walk it, which is what makes sight-lines and mounting heights readable.

Moving around

What you see floating in the room

Every placed object draws a marker at its real position. The shape and colour come from its type and from your colour rules, so a glance across the hall tells you which ports are live and which cameras are calibrated. Cameras draw as a small wireframe frustum pointing exactly where they point. Objects carrying a note show the first line of that note as a floating label, readable through walls so you never lose it behind geometry. Cable runs draw as lines tracing their real path, thickening into a tube when selected.

Where the view leaves off

Your viewpoint is remembered per venue: close the tab, come back tomorrow, and you are standing where you left. Reset view in the top bar returns you to the venue's origin if you ever fly somewhere you can't get back from.

Windows picker

Your workspace

Every tool is a floating window over the 3D room. You choose which are open, put them where you want them, and the arrangement is yours from then on.

The Windows: list in the top bar has one tick box per available window — Detail, Search, Coverage, Graph, Notes, and so on. Tick to open, untick to close. The 3D room stays live behind them.

• Move a window by dragging its title bar. It snaps to the screen edges and to other windows so a tidy layout stays tidy.
• Collapse it to just its title bar with the ▾ button — useful for parking a window you want back in one click.
• Close it with ×, or untick it in the Windows list.
• Resize from the bottom-right corner.

Your layout — which windows are open, where, how big, which are collapsed — is remembered per venue, so each space can have its own arrangement: a coverage workspace in one, a patching workspace in another.

Filters panel

Filters

A fully documented venue is a busy one. Filters strip the 3D view down to just the kind of thing you're working on.

The Filters panel floats over the 3D view and can be dragged anywhere. It has two sections:

• Types — one tick box per object type, all ticked by default. Untick keystone and cable run and a hall of 200 items becomes a clean picture of your cameras.
• Flags — tick one or more flags to show only objects carrying at least one of them. Tick nothing and no flag filter applies. Flags set by your colour rules appear here too, so you can filter on a computed state such as "connected" without ever having tagged anything by hand.

The Graph and Notes windows carry their own independent filter strips, so you can narrow one view without disturbing another. Each view's filter settings are remembered per venue.

Camera objects

Cameras in 3D

A camera in Venue Manager isn't a dot on a plan. It is a real position, a real direction and real optics — which is what lets the app compute what it sees.

Cameras draw as a wireframe frustum: a little pyramid opening in the direction the camera faces, at its mounted position. That alone answers a surprising number of site questions — is it aimed at the entrance or past it, is it pointing down far enough, did someone rotate it during cleaning.

Aiming a camera

A camera's orientation is edited as three rotation values in its detail window, and the wireframe updates as you type — so you can nudge it until it matches the photo you took on site. Position is set the same way as any other object: click a surface in 3D, or type exact coordinates.

Standing inside the camera

View from camera in a camera's detail window moves your viewpoint to that camera's exact position and orientation, with its real field of view. You are, for that moment, looking at the venue through it — the quickest possible check of framing, obstructions and whether the mount is where the drawing said. Reset view puts you back to a normal wide view.

What makes a camera "calibrated"

For coverage to be computed, a camera needs its optical values as well as its position: focal lengths, image size and rotation. These arrive automatically with a calibration import, or can be filled in by hand. The Coverage window always tells you how many cameras currently qualify, so a camera that quietly lacks its optics never silently disappears from the analysis.

Coverage window

Coverage

The room, painted with what your cameras can actually see — walls, beams and equipment taken into account. Blind spots stop being an argument and become a colour.

Tick Show coverage and every placed, calibrated camera projects into the room. Each surface is coloured by how many cameras have a genuine line of sight to it. Anything a wall, a truss, a pillar or a piece of equipment blocks is left unpainted — that is exactly the point. Uncoloured floor is floor no camera sees.

• 1 camera
• 2 cameras
• 3 cameras
• 4 or more

For systems that only work when several cameras see a subject at once — tracking, volumetric capture, redundancy requirements — the overlap count is the number that matters, and reading it off the room is far quicker than reasoning about it.

Where to paint the coverage

Venue surfaces

Paint the room itself — floor, walls, structure. The honest picture of the whole space.

Slice plane

Paint a horizontal plane at a height you choose (1.7 m by default — roughly head height). This answers the question most venues actually care about: coverage where people are, not coverage of the floor they stand on. Change the height to check waist level, a tabletop, or a raised stage.

Surfaces + slice

Both at once.

Opacity fades the overlay so you can read the room through it.

Field-of-view cones

The camera list below the legend puts a translucent cone in the room for any camera you tick — its true field of view, from the lens outward. One cone shows what a single camera contributes. Several show where their views overlap, coloured with the same scale. This is the tool for the "should we move this one two metres left" conversation.

Occlude cones (on by default) cuts each cone off where the room blocks it, so a cone shows reach rather than intention. Untick it to see the full geometric cone regardless of obstacles — useful when deciding where a camera could go if the obstruction were removed.

Making the obstacles honest

Objects block cameras

On by default. Equipment you have placed in the room — anything drawn as a solid shape or an uploaded 3D model — blocks cameras just like the building does. Put a crate, a screen or a plinth where it will actually stand and watch the coverage behind it disappear.

Ignore occluders within N m of the camera

Off by default. For cameras recessed into ceiling openings or housings, the model can make a camera appear blocked by its own mounting. Switching this on ignores anything within the distance you set of each camera, so the result reflects the installation rather than the modelling.

Who sees me

Tick Who sees me and the panel keeps a live list of which cameras can see the exact spot you are standing in, updating as you fly. Cameras that are pointing at you but blocked by something are listed separately and marked blocked — the distinction that tells you whether to re-aim a camera or move the thing in its way. Walk a route through the venue and you have a walkthrough survey without leaving the desk.

Live tracking window

Live tracking

Objects your on-site tracking system is following, moving in real time inside the 3D venue — next to the fixed installation they are moving through.

When a tracking system is running in the space, Venue Manager can display what it reports. Tracked objects appear in the room and move as they move, at full smooth motion. Because they share the view with your documented hardware, you see them in context: a tracked object drifting through a wall, or leaving the area your cameras cover, is obvious the instant it happens.

Setting it up for a venue

1. Open the Live tracking window.
2. Under Receiver, tick Receive tracking data and enter the port your tracking system sends to. Each venue uses its own port, so several spaces can stream at once.
3. Press Apply receiver settings.
4. Tick Show live objects under Display.

Two status lines at the top of the panel report both ends of the link at once — is data arriving at the server, and is it reaching your browser, how fast, and how fresh the newest position is. When something isn't moving, those two lines immediately separate a network problem from a display setting.

Lining the tracker up with the room

The Calibration section carries the same kind of controls as the camera import — axis mapping and mirroring, scale, rotation and offset — so the tracking system's coordinates land in the right place in your model. Orientation follows position automatically: once objects are in the right place, they also face the right way. Two extra switches handle trackers that describe rotation differently, for the case where an object sits correctly but turns the wrong way.

What each tracked object looks like

Each slot the tracker reports can be given its own name and colour, and drawn in one of three ways:

Wireframe

The default. Every detected marker on the object is drawn as a dot and joined to the others, so you see the actual constellation the tracker is seeing — including the moment a marker drops out.

Model

A 3D model of your choosing, placed at the object's position and orientation — for a presentable view rather than a diagnostic one.

Hidden

Not drawn — for a tracker slot reporting noise.

A tracked slot can also be bound to a venue object. Clicking the moving object then opens that object's record, with its notes, flags and connections. The object's own recorded position stays where it is, so the nominal position and the live one are visible side by side — the fastest way to spot a piece of kit that has been moved and never re-recorded.

Display settings

Marker wireframe, marker dots, marker ID labels, object labels, marker size, label size and update rate are all per-viewer settings, remembered in your own browser — so a second person watching the same venue can have a completely different view without disturbing yours. Show marker IDs prints each marker's number beside it, which is how a specific physical marker on a rig is found by eye.

Add object window

Adding objects

Everything physical in the venue is an object: a camera, a computer, a switch, a wall port, a cable run, a crate, a screen.

The Add object window asks for three things: what type it is, an ID you will recognise (hall4-pi-02, A17, cam-north-3), and optional notes. Create it and its detail window opens straight away.

A new object starts unplaced — it exists, it is searchable, it can be connected to other things, it just has no position yet. That is deliberate: you can record a delivery of twenty devices today and place them as they go up on the wall next week. Unplaced objects are flagged as such in search results so nothing gets forgotten.

IDs must be unique within a venue, which is what keeps a shared inventory honest.

Detail window

The object detail window

The record behind a marker: everything known about one object, and the place where you say where it is.

Select anything — in 3D, in the graph, in search — and its detail window fills in. Edits save themselves as you make them; there is no Save button to forget.

Identity and data

• ID — rename at any time; it stays unique within the venue.
• Fields — whatever its type defines: a serial number, a hostname, a port count, a channel, a reference to another object. Each type has its own form, so a camera asks camera questions and a switch asks switch questions.
• Notes — free text for anything worth remembering: the IP it was given, the fact that the third port is faulty, which key opens its housing. The first part of the note floats beside the object in 3D, so a warning is visible from across the room.
• Flags — short tags such as connected, verified, faulty. Flags are shared across the whole system, so the same word means the same thing everywhere. They drive colour rules, filters and search.

Placing it in the room

Place switches the 3D view into placement mode. A preview marker follows your cursor and sticks to whatever surface you hover — wall, floor, beam, ceiling — standing very slightly off it, the way a real bracket does. Click to confirm, Esc to cancel. It matches how hardware is actually mounted, so placement is fast and accurate without typing a single coordinate.

For anything hanging in mid-air — a rigged camera, a suspended fixture — type exact X, Y and Z instead. Unplace removes the position while keeping the record, for equipment taken down but not disposed of.

Removing it

Delete Object asks for confirmation, then removes the object and the connections that referenced it.

Detail window → Connections

Connections & chains

What is plugged into what — recorded once, visible everywhere: in the 3D room, in the graph, in search, and in the colours on your markers.

A connection joins two objects. Add one from an object's detail window by typing the other object's ID — or press the pick button and simply click the other object in the 3D view, which is far quicker when you can see both.

Chains: connections that pass through something

Real cabling rarely runs point to point. A wall port reaches a switch through a patch box; a camera reaches a computer through a trunk. So a connection can be a chain of several objects in order — port → patch box → switch — recorded as one relationship rather than a pile of fragments.

• Add a node by ID, or by clicking it in the 3D view.
• Reorder nodes with ↑ and ↓ until the chain matches the real path.
• Remove a node, or delete the whole chain.

Chains are what let the app answer "what is on the other end of this" across intermediate hardware, and what lets the graph show you a complete run end to end.

Path objects

Cable runs & paths

Where a cable physically goes — drawn through the room, so the next person doesn't open the wrong ceiling panel.

A cable run is an ordinary object whose shape is a path: an ordered series of points through the space. It renders as a line following the real route — up the wall, along the tray, across the ceiling, down to the rack — and thickens into a tube when selected so you can follow it through a crowded room.

Drawing a path

1. Select the cable run and press Edit path.
2. Click through the room; each click adds a point where you clicked on a surface.
3. Use the point list to insert a point after any other, delete one, or clear the path entirely. The points show as markers in 3D while you edit.
4. Done commits, Cancel discards.

Connections can then name a cable run as the route they take. In the graph those connections are drawn differently and labelled with the run they pass through, so "these eight links all share the trunk through the north wall" is something you can see rather than something you have to remember.

Object types window

Object types

Types decide what a kind of thing is called, what questions it asks, and what it looks like in the room. Defining a new one takes a minute and needs nobody's help.

Cameras, computers, switches, wall ports and cable runs are types. So is anything else you install — a projector, a speaker, a plinth, a sensor. Types are shared across every venue, so the vocabulary stays consistent as you add spaces.

What a type defines

Name, colour and icon

The default appearance of its markers in the 3D room and in the graph.

Marker shape

A flat dot or square, a sphere, a cube, a camera frustum, or an uploaded 3D model at a scale you set. Solid shapes and models are more than decoration — they block cameras in the coverage calculation, so a modelled crate casts a real shadow in the analysis.

Fields

The questions this type asks: text (a serial, a hostname), a yes/no, a number, a reference to another object, or a path through the room. Fields appear as a form in every object's detail window, and can be compared in colour rules.

A type in use can't be deleted until its objects are gone — the app says so rather than quietly orphaning your data. Changes to a type appear immediately on every object of that type, in every open window.

Rules window

Colour rules

Turn the state of your installation into colour. The room stops being a map of where things are and becomes a status board of how they're doing.

Each object type can carry a short list of rules. They are read top to bottom and the first one that matches wins; a final default catches everything else. The result is applied live — to markers in 3D and to nodes in the graph — and updates the moment the underlying data changes.

A typical set for wall ports reads like this:

• if it is flagged connected and reaches a computer → green
• if it is flagged connected → yellow
• otherwise → red

Fly through the hall and commissioning progress reads itself off the walls. No report, no spreadsheet, no counting.

What a rule can test

• whether a flag is set;
• whether the object connects to something of a given type — following chains, so an intermediate patch box doesn't hide the link;
• a comparison on one of the type's fields (equal, not equal, greater, less);
• the object's type.

Conditions combine with a flat and / or — deliberately simple, so rules stay readable by whoever inherits them.

What a rule can do

Set the marker's colour, its icon, its label, whether it is visible at all, or set a flag on it. That last one is quietly powerful: a rule-set flag can be filtered on and tested by other rules, so "everything commissioned" becomes a state you can filter the room by without tagging a single object by hand.

Two ways to edit

A block editor with dropdowns for people who want to click, and a plain-text view of the same rules for people who would rather read the whole logic at once. They are two views of one thing; edit in either, and mistakes in the text view are reported line by line.

Graph window

Connection graph

The same venue as a wiring diagram. When the question is topology rather than geography, this is the faster view.

Every object is a node, every connection a line. Nodes carry the colours from your rules, so the graph is a status board too. Connections routed through a cable run are drawn dashed and labelled with the run they use, so shared conduits are obvious.

Working the graph

• Zoom with the + / − buttons, the wheel, or a pinch; pan by dragging the background; the ⤢ button fits everything back on screen.
• Drag nodes into an arrangement that mirrors the real rack or wall. Positions you set are pinned: adding new objects later never disturbs your layout.
• Selection is shared with the 3D view — click a node and the object lights up in the room, and the other way round. That link is the whole point: find it in the diagram, then see where it physically is.

Cutting the graph down

Type and flag filters

Show only the kinds of thing you're tracing.

Rule-state filters

For any type with rules, show only objects whose rules are matching, or only those where they aren't — the fastest way to isolate everything not yet commissioned without touching the rest of the diagram.

Selected only

Reduce the graph to the selected object's connection chains, end to end. In a venue with hundreds of links, this turns an unreadable web into a single run.

Saved layouts

Arrange the graph the way a particular conversation needs it and save it under a name. Saved layouts are stored with the venue and shared with everyone who opens it, so "the patching view" or "the camera network" is one dropdown away for the whole team.

Notes window

Notes

Everything worth remembering about the venue, in one list — and pinned to the thing it's about.

The Notes window gathers two kinds of note. Venue notes stand on their own: access arrangements, the spare-parts location, what the client asked for last Tuesday. Object notes are the notes written on individual objects, collected here so you can read the venue's accumulated knowledge without clicking through two hundred markers.

• Add, edit and delete venue notes inline.
• Filter the list by text to find the note you half-remember.
• Click an object's note to select that object — the 3D view and graph follow.

Object notes also appear in the room itself, floating beside their object and readable through walls. A note on a faulty port is visible from across the hall rather than buried in a record nobody thought to open.

Search window

Search

Find anything by what you remember about it — not just its name.

Search reads IDs, notes, type names and flag names at once, so a half-remembered detail is enough: type faulty and get every object whose notes mention it; type a partial serial and land on the device.

• Narrow by type and by flag.
• Unplaced only lists everything recorded but not yet positioned — your standing to-do list during an installation.
• Click a result to select it; if it's placed, the 3D view goes to it.

Objects window

Objects browser

A plain dropdown of everything in the venue, for when you'd rather pick from a list than search or hunt.

Filter by type, then choose an object by ID. Selecting it lights it up in 3D and in the graph. Go to details opens its record, and Delete removes it after a confirmation. It's the quickest route through a venue whose naming you already know by heart.

Port board window

Port board

A venue's patch panel as a grid of tick boxes — patching recorded at the speed of the physical work.

Where a venue has a patch panel, the port board shows all of its ports laid out in their real groups and numbers. Tick a port and the app records that it is patched through to the switch; untick and the link is removed. What is really being written is a full connection through the patch box, exactly as if you had built it by hand in the detail window — the port board is just a very fast way to do it while standing at the panel with a laptop.

Because it writes real connections, everything else follows immediately: markers in the 3D room recolour under your rules, the graph gains its links, and search finds the port as connected.

The board starts locked. Tick Unlocked (edit mode) to make changes — a deliberate speed bump so a stray tap on a tablet can't quietly unpatch a hall. It re-locks itself whenever the venue is reloaded.

The port board is configured per venue and only appears where a patch panel has been set up.

Phones & tablets

On a phone or tablet

The whole app runs on a phone — which matters, because most of this work happens standing in the room, not sitting at a desk.

• Move with the on-screen joystick at the bottom left.
• Look around by dragging on the right-hand side of the screen.
• Select by tapping an object.

Instead of floating windows, a scrollable tab bar sits under the top bar with one tab per tool. Tapping a tab slides that panel up as a sheet from the bottom of the screen; tapping × puts it away again. Everything else works as it does on a desktop — tick a port on the board, add a note against a device while you're looking at it, check whether the camera above you actually sees where you're standing.

Scope

What it deliberately doesn't do

Knowing the edges of a tool is part of trusting it. These are choices, not gaps waiting to be filled.

The room model comes from your 3D software

Venue Manager displays the room model you give it; it doesn't edit geometry. When the building changes, a new model is exported and swapped in — your inventory, connections and notes are kept.

Live tracking is a view, not a recorder

There is no history and no playback. The live view shows what is arriving now.

Colour rules stay simple on purpose

Rules are a readable list of conditions, not a scripting language. The ceiling is intentional: rules written by one person must remain obvious to the next.

Coverage models sight-lines, not image quality

It answers whether a camera has a clear line to a point at its real field of view. It does not judge lighting, focus or resolution at distance — those stay a matter for your eye and the camera itself.