# Design Applications Without Actual Camera Hardware

You can design applications in the development environment, without the hardware of the run time environment to be present. For example if someone is creating an eight-camera application, there is no need for the eight cameras to be present all the time.

To create an application without the actual hardware present, follow the steps below:

1. Open Designer and create a new project.
2. Once it is created, right-click on Cameras in the Explorer pane and select Add | 'Camera' Device.

3. Enter a name for the camera, and click Accept.

4. An error message appears that Designer cannot connect to the hardware device; click OK to acknowledge it.

5. You can use these camera devices in your application and replace them with the actual hardware elements in runtime environment later.

Note:

- If you connect a physical camera, you have to disconnect the "empty" camera device that is to be replaced to be able to assign the new device the same name. The side effect of this is that the device reference block pins in Tasks all get disconnected and you have to reconnect these pins.
- From Designer 2.0, you do not have to replace the "virtual" devices with the real ones. When you connect the physical device, it automatically replaces the virtual one.