Verkada wows ISC West 2025 visitors with AI-powered cloud surveillance escape room demo

User experience took center stage at the booth of Verkada at ISC West this year, where the company created an immersive escape room to demonstrate how effortlessly its AI-powered cloud video surveillance tools and real-time monitoring features can be operated on the Command platform.
 
The platform, for which the Silicon Valley-based company brought a host of updates, is the heart and soul of its AI surveillance architecture.
 
“We've thought about all the various applications of AI and how it can be brought to our customers in ways that are useful,” said Adam Rabin, the company's Senior Product Marketing Manager. “We don't want to just have the technology for the sake of the technology. We have instead tailored our applications to address very specific use cases.”
 
Command’s latest features include state-of-the-art License Plate Recognition (LPR), History Player Search facial recognition and the integration of new potent hardware, such as Verkada's latest PTZ camera that can zoom in on people over 1.5km away—all of which can be operated through intuitive commands.
 

Video analytics in seconds

To showcase the features and more, visitors were invited to the booth to explore them in an escape room demo that added a playful challenge to the user experience as well as demonstrated how tasks can be completed with ease and within a short time.
 
“With the escape room, we wanted to basically show that you can use a series of really powerful tools to find what you're looking for in seconds,” said Rabin, who accompanied asmag.com during the experience.
 

Five minutes in the escape room

Just like other escape room experiences, visitors had five minutes to solve a riddle and open the door, for which we had to find out a six-digit code based on three tasks:
 

• Finding the license plate of a car based on a simple description among a vast set of footage—by filtering for license plate type, color, make and model.
• Finding a person who had—on a different occasion, wearing different clothes—sought unauthorized access to the premises.
• Zoom in on a distant object to see specific details.
   

Despite the complexity, it was easy to solve the riddles thanks to the intuitive commands that the platform allows users to punch in to filter metadata. We were among the 2,000 groups who managed to escape the room, while only two groups failed the task.
 

Easy-to-use biometric tools

Verkada's History Player Search offered a glimpse at the company's AI prowess in facial recognition.
 
To find the suspect who had tried to enter the premises, we filtered the metadata by “access denied events,” selected the person in the corresponding footage and Command presented us footage of other instances when the same person was captured on camera.
 
“Where we’re moving next is being able to search for actions, such as ‘person sleeping,’ or ‘person falling,’ or ‘people arguing,’” Rabin said. “We're actively working on being able to support searching actions, not just still individuals.”
 

Powerful hardware

At this point there was still plenty of time on the clock for our escape room experience. Finding the last clue was easy.
 
Using a device that should feel second nature in the hands of many ISC West visitors—an Xbox controller—we moved around and zoomed in and out of a live feed of security footage from outside the escape room. With the help of Verkada’s new CP63-E PTZ camera and its 32x optical zoom, we found the last clue and had made our escape.
 

Integrating hardware and software

Verkada operates a vertically integrated architecture—its own hardware works exclusively with its Command platform, while the platform itself supports integration with legacy devices from other manufacturers. To facilitate integration, the company showcased its new Command Connector, an ONVIF Profile S conformant client that helps integrate third-party hardware.
 
Verkada is constantly updating the list of devices Command supports, from cameras to alarms and access controls, Rabin said. Command feeds and data can also be easily integrated into software that is commonly being used by corporate clients, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, he added.
 
Another highlight at the Verkada booth was a stunning 15-foot LED globe that visualized real-time platform activity across more than 90 Fortune 500 companies. It offered attendees a powerful demonstration of Verkada's global impact and enterprise-scale capabilities, all of which run on its cloud-based, AI-driven platform.