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ARGUS User Manual

Panoptic

Panoptic is ARGUS’s real-time intelligence overlay. It aggregates feeds from dozens of public and licensed data sources and renders them as live map layers alongside your own mission data. Civilian aircraft, CCTV camera locations, earthquakes, cyber-threat events, air-quality stations — all pulled, normalised, and drawn inside the Cesium 3D viewer.

Panoptic is fully implemented — not aspirational — and runs in cesium3d mode only.

Opening Panoptic

In the map tile’s Layers sidebar, switch to the FUSION tab. Panoptic feeds appear as togglable layer rows. Each feed can be independently turned on/off. Enabled feeds auto-refresh based on the current camera view bounds so you only pull data for the area you’re looking at.

The feed library

Panoptic ships with 40+ feeds organised into categories. Availability per org depends on your subscription tier and which data agreements apply.

Aviation & defence

  • ADS-B civilian flights — real-time aircraft positions from ADS-B receivers. Renders as airplane icons with callsign labels, altitude, heading. Hover to see origin + destination if known.
  • ACLED conflict events — Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project feed. Attacks, protests, fatalities. Hex markers coloured by event severity.

Infrastructure & security

  • CCTV cameras — geolocated public CCTV camera locations. Pin markers with camera glyph. Click for URL + provider info.
  • Cyber threats — CVSS / NVD-sourced vulnerability feed. Hex markers at affected locations (where geo data is available), severity-coloured.

Geophysical

  • Earthquakes — USGS real-time quake feed. Circle markers sized by magnitude, coloured by recency. Click for magnitude, depth, full USGS details.
  • Aurora borealis — NOAA space-weather data. Renders as an alpha-blended polar-oval overlay when aurora is active.

Environmental

  • Air quality — WAQI / OpenAQ sensor network. Coloured circles by PM2.5 AQI (green good → purple hazardous).

Lifestyle / civic

  • Bikeshare stations — GBFS-aggregated bike-share locations. Useful for urban SAR planning where operators might commandeer a bike-share.

And more

Your org’s admin page under Integrations → Panoptic lists every feed available to your tier.

Entity rendering

Each feed type has its own marker style:

  • Threats / conflict events — hex markers, threat-level coloured:
    • CRITICAL → red
    • HIGH → orange
    • MEDIUM → yellow
    • LOW → green
  • CCTV — pin with camera icon.
  • Aircraft — airplane glyph rotated to match heading.
  • Earthquakes — filled circle, size = magnitude.
  • Polygon zones (e.g. aurora oval) — translucent fill with subtle stroke.

Info cards

Click any Panoptic entity to open the info drawer on the right. Shows:

  • Label + sublabel — e.g. “United AA123” / “Boeing 737-800”.
  • Metadata table — all key-value pairs the feed provides.
  • Source URL — usually a link back to the originating data provider for full context (USGS earthquake page, NVD CVE entry, etc.).
  • Thumbnail / video player — CCTV feeds with public streams embed a player inline.
  • Timestamp + age — shows the age of the data point (5 min old, 2 h old, etc.).

Refresh cadence

Each feed has its own refresh cadence tuned to the data type:

FeedTypical cadence
ADS-BEvery 5-10 s
EarthquakesEvery 60 s
CCTVStatic, refreshed on mount
ACLEDEvery 15 min
Air qualityEvery 5 min
AuroraEvery 10 min

Refreshes scope to the camera frustum — data outside what you’re looking at isn’t fetched.

Performance

Heavy feeds (ADS-B in metropolitan areas) can draw thousands of entities. To keep the scene responsive:

  • Entities are clustered at low zoom levels. Zoom in to split clusters.
  • Off-screen entities are culled from the scene graph.
  • The layer sidebar has a master “Disable all Panoptic” toggle for emergency cleanup.

Attribution

Most feeds require attribution. The attribution line appears in the Panoptic panel footer whenever at least one of those feeds is visible. Please don’t strip or hide this — our data agreements with providers depend on it.

Availability per org

Not every feed is on by default. Your org admin enables which feeds apply under Admin → Organisation → Integrations → Panoptic. Licensed feeds (some CCTV networks, some commercial threat feeds) may be gated behind additional subscription tiers.