skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Mixed-Reality Platform for Coordination and Situation Awareness in Smart Buildings
Coordination and situation awareness are amongst the most important aspects of collaborative analysis in smart buildings. They are especially useful for emergency responses such as firefighters, police, and military soldiers. Currently, the communication between command centers and crews are often performed via voice, cameras, and possibly hand-held devices; which offer limited and in-efficient solutions. This work investigates a mixed-reality platform to improve the coordination and situation awareness for multiple users performing real-time operations in smart buildings. Our platform provides a flexible architecture to synchronize crew locations in buildings and vital information across the team and command center in real-time. We have also developed several immersive interaction functions to support efficient exchange of useful visual information. The case study and example results demonstrate the advantages of our immersive approach for on-site collaboration in real physical environment.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1840080
PAR ID:
10116336
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
APSCC
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Chen, J.Y.C.; Fragomeni, G (Ed.)
    Visualizing data effectively is critical for the discovery process in the age of big data. We are exploring the use of immersive virtual reality platforms for scientific data visualization for COVID-19 pandemic. We are interested in finding ways to better understand, perceive and interact with multidimensional data in the field of cognition technology and human-computer interaction. Immersive visualization leads to a better understanding and perception of relationships in the data. This paper presents a data visualization tool for immersive data visualizations based on the Unity development platform. The data visualization tool is capable of visualizing the real-time COVID pandemic data for the fifty states in the USA. Immersion provides a better understanding of the data than traditional desktop visualization tools and leads to more human-centric situational awareness insights. This research effort aims to identify how graphical objects like charts and bar graphs depicted in Virtual Reality tools, developed in accordance with an analyst’s mental model can enhance an analyst’s situation awareness. Our results also suggest that users feel more satisfied when using immersive virtual reality data visualization tools and thus demonstrate the potential of immersive data analytics. 
    more » « less
  2. Human-centric situational awareness and visualization are needed for analyzing the big data in an efficient way. One of the challenges is to create an algorithm to analyze the given data without any help of other data analyzing tools. This research effort aims to identify how graphical objects (such as data-shapes) developed in accordance with an analyst's mental model can enhance analyst's situation awareness. Our approach for improved big data visualization is two-fold, focusing on both visualization and interaction. This paper presents the developed data and graph technique based on forcedirected model graph in 3D. It is developed using Unity 3D gaming engine. Pilot testing was done with different data sets for checking the efficiency of the system in immersive environment and non-immersive environment. The application is able to handle the data successfully for the given data sets in data visualization. The currently graph can render around 200 to 300 linked nodes in real-time. 
    more » « less
  3. Home area networks (HANs) are the most vulnerable part of smart grids since they are not directly controlled by utilities. Device authentication is one of most important mechanisms to protect the security of smart grid-enabled HANs (SG-HANs). In this paper, we propose a situation-aware scheme for efficient device authentication in SG-HANs. The proposed scheme utilizes the security risk information assessed by the smart home system with a situational awareness feature. A suitable authentication protocol with adequate security protection and computational and communication complexity is then selected based on the assessed security risk level. A protocol design of the proposed scheme considering two security risk levels is presented in the paper. The security of the design is verified by using both formal verification and informal security analysis. Our performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is efficient in terms of computational and communication costs. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Real-time data visualization can enhance decision making and empower teams with human-centric situational awareness insights. Decision making relies on data which comes in overwhelming velocity and volume, that one cannot comprehend it without some layer of abstraction. This research effort aims to demonstrate the data visualization of the COVID pandemic in real-time for the fifty states in the USA. Our proposed data visualization tool includes both conceptual and data-driven information. The data visualization includes stacked bar graphs, geographic representations of the data, and offers situational awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper describes the development and testing of the data visualization tool using the Unity gaming engine. Testing has been done with a real-time feed of the COVID-19 data set for immersive environment, non-immersive environment, and mobile environment. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Situational awareness provides the decision making capability to identify, process, and comprehend big data. In our approach, situational awareness is achieved by integrating and analyzing multiple aspects of data using stacked bar graphs and geographic representations of the data. We provide a data visualization tool to represent COVID pandemic data on top of the geographical information. The combination of geospatial and temporal data provides the information needed to conduct situational analysis for the COVID-19 pandemic. By providing interactivity, geographical maps can be viewed from different perspectives and offer insight into the dynamical aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic for the fifty states in the USA. We have overlaid dynamic information on top of a geographical representation in an intuitive way for decision making. We describe how modeling and simulation of data increase situational awareness, especially when coupled with immersive virtual reality interaction. This paper presents an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and mobile environment for data visualization using Oculus Rift head-mounted display and smartphones. This work combines neural network predictions with human-centric situational awareness and data analytics to provide accurate, timely, and scientific strategies in combatting and mitigating the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Testing and evaluation of the data visualization tool have been done with real-time feed of COVID pandemic data set for immersive environment, non-immersive environment, and mobile environment. 
    more » « less