Signals by YYZdata

The bike racks fill at 9:20, and thirty-one spaces sit empty two hundred feet away.

Signals turns the cameras and the building models a campus already owns into live answers: what is free right now, what space is actually being used, and what happened last night. One box on site, nothing new on the walls, and a database the college keeps.

$156

of deferred capital renewal now carried per square foot of campus, up 8% in a single year. The buildings are the debt, and almost nobody can say which ones are earning their keep.

Gordian, 2026 State of Facilities in Higher Education, April 2026.

73.5%

of the spending needed just to stop that backlog growing is what institutions actually spend on the buildings they already have.

Gordian, 2026 State of Facilities in Higher Education.

70%

of available weekly room hours is the classroom utilization most institutions target. Very few can measure, hour by hour, what they actually get.

SmithGroup, Is Your Institution Getting the Most from Its Classrooms, 2026.

95 to 125%

is where campus dining peak occupancy landed by 2023, up from 75 to 95% before the pandemic. Fitness peaks now run 125 to 130%.

Buro Happold, measured space usage across 38 institutions.

What students are actually asking

Is there anywhere to lock my bike, or am I circling the quad again?How long is the line at the dining hall right now?Is there a free seat on the quiet floor, before I walk across campus?Is the path back to my dorm lit tonight?

None of it needs a new sensor. The cameras already see the racks, the seats, the line and the path. Signals publishes the count.

▸

Answers, not footage.

After-hours presence with a location, a propped door flagged at minute two, an incident packaged in minutes. Three things a five-person team can act on instead of eight hours nobody watches.

▸

The space bill, finally counted.

Occupied against scheduled by building and hour, rooms booked and never used, and conditioning set against the people actually in the room.

▸

And the student gets the same answer.

Which bike rack has a spot, which floor has seats, how long the line is, whether the walk home is lit. Same counts, published.

Willowdale College is an invented campus and every figure inside the demo is simulated. The four figures above are real and sourced. Camera frames are AI-generated; the pixelation you can flip on the big view is the routine that runs on a live box.

Operations command·Willowdale College ·Sixteen buildings · Tuesday mid-morning · last night packaged, today live Live · simulated

What this is. Signals reads the cameras and systems the campus already owns and turns them into answers the people running the buildings can act on today. One box on site, nothing new on the walls, and a database the college keeps. This screen is the facilities board. The tabs above are the same numbers as planning, campus safety and the student see them.

Every tile opens the story behind its number. Tap one.

Recommended actions · right now

The cameras, and the blur

● live

Privacy blurOff · raw view. Flip it and watch the on-box pixelation sweep the frame, live.

This morning's readiness card

Four things worth a person's attention today, each with the evidence attached. Tap a row.

Where the counting gets its coordinates

Every number on this screen resolves to a row in one zone table. The table comes from the campus model. The cameras only supply what is in each zone right now.

Read from the modelRebuilt from geometrySet once in the field

Gap

Delivered models often carry no rooms

Geometry complete, no space objects, so nothing downstream can count. An automated pass rebuilds the zones from the wall geometry and names them.

Coverage

11 of 14 zones already seen

Two partial, one blind. Solved against the geometry, so the gap comes back with coordinates rather than a vendor's guess.

The posture, verifiable

What is connected

Willowdale College is an invented campus and every figure on this page is simulated. Camera frames are AI-generated; the blur switch is the appliance's real routine. Signals supports a safety team's awareness; it is not a life-safety system of record. Nothing face-derived is computed anywhere in the pipeline: no facial recognition, no face templates, no age or gender inference.

Live feed

The campus right now

Ask Signals

Available right now

The same zone table, read the other way round. Capacity from the model, count from the cameras.

0 free

Library South bike rack

Full since 9:20, eleventh straight weekday.

31 free

Structure B bike rack

At 22% and it has never filled this term. Four minutes away.

18 free

Sawyer level 4 seats

The quiet floor. Science atrium has 40 open and talking is allowed there.

6 min

Mann Commons line

Doubles at 11:50 with the timetable.

A student asks this forty times a week and no campus can answer it. Ten weeks of the same counts is also the capital argument.

What the campus itself is saying

Path

The lit path is not the walked path

Two thirds of the late walk from the library cuts the grass line east of the quad rather than taking the lit walkway.

Rooms

Nine rooms nobody enters

Scheduled, lit and conditioned all term, never occupied. All nine sit off the corridor the wayfinding does not name.

Door

One closer is doing all the propping

Science corridor east accounts for three of this week's four held doors. The door is the problem, not the people.

Questions a campus has never been able to ask, because until the zones existed there was nothing to ask them of.