Hitachi

The Social Distancing Cart is a Hitachi platform for keeping an eye on factory floors. It runs on live camera feeds and computer vision. It started with COVID-era distancing checks, then grew into wider activity and safety monitoring across plants. As Staff Product Designer I worked on it with the team. We built it as enterprise software at Hitachi scale. That means heavy day-to-day tools, a strict corporate brand, and people who spend their day in factories.

Some of the work was new features built from zero, like the live 360 sessions and the model marketplace. The rest was adapting and extending older screens. That covered the camera walls, recorded review, and reporting. I wanted it to feel like one clear, consistent system.

Enterprise UX, at Hitachi scale

Designing inside a company this big is a job in itself. The product had to feel unmistakably Hitachi. Restrained, corporate, and accessible. At the same time it carried some heavy tools. Hundreds of cameras across factories and zones, live and recorded video, 360 feeds, sessions, audit trails, and a model marketplace.

• Make a wall of camera feeds scannable, filterable, and calm rather than a surveillance blur.
• Support live monitoring, recording, and after-the-fact review in one flow.
• Hold the Hitachi brand and accessibility bar across every surface.

Closer to the customer than the brief

The work wasn't only tickets from product management. In a B2B segment like this the customers and operators are reachable, so I took demos and clickable prototypes straight to them. I would show a direction, gather feedback in context, then bring it back to refine inside the team. I could start those conversations myself. Each demo became a way to get extra feedback from the people who actually run a factory floor, before the engineers started building.

The prototypes in those sessions were built with AI tools. That was fast enough to turn an idea into something interactive for the next demo. Feedback landed on the real interaction rather than a flat screen.

The camera wall

This is the home surface. Every camera in a zone at a glance, filtered by factory, zone, camera, and status. From the grid an operator drops into a single feed full-screen. A thumbnail wall and a floor-plan minimap help them keep their bearings across the plant.

Live 360 sessions

An “activity check” runs as a live session. You get a pannable 360 feed, participants, and a running comment thread, with one-tap recording. Monitoring becomes something people do together. They review a floor side by side, in context.

Recorded review with privacy built in

Sessions are recorded for later review and audit, with face and background blur as a first-class option. You're monitoring people's workplaces, so the responsible choice is baked in from the start, not bolted on later.

Reporting & audit

Everything rolls up into reports. It's a dense, filterable table of audits and events by factory, zone, cameras, type, and status. From there it exports to a shareable session report. This is the clear, professional end of the product.

A marketplace of vision models

The platform is built to extend. There's a marketplace where teams add computer-vision models to a factory, from object recognition to whatever they need next. A simple monitoring tool can grow as the work changes.

What it adds up to

A heavy industrial platform with live monitoring, recording, reporting, and an extensible model marketplace. We took it from new features through redesigns until it felt like one calm, consistent product. It stays on-brand for Hitachi and easy to read for the people who run a factory floor.