Indoor navigation in complex building environments poses significant challenges, particularly for individuals who are unfamiliar with their surroundings. Mixed reality (MR) technologies have emerged as a promising solution to enhance situational awareness and facilitate navigation within indoor spaces. However, there is a lack of spatial data for indoor environments, including outdated floor plans and limited real-time operational data. This paper presents the development of a mixed-reality application for indoor building navigation and evacuation. The application uses feature extraction for location sensing and situational awareness to provide accurate and reliable navigation in any indoor environment using Microsoft HoloLens. The application can track the user's position and orientation and give the user-specific information on how to evacuate the building. This information is then used to generate navigation instructions for the user. We demonstrate how this mixed reality HoloLens application can provide spatially contextualized 3D visualizations that promote spatial knowledge acquisition and situational awareness. These 3D visualizations are developed as an emergency evacuation and navigation tool to aid the building occupants in safe and quick evacuation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the application, providing 3D visualizations of multilevel spaces and aiding individuals in understanding their position and evacuation path during emergencies. We believe that adopting mixed reality technologies, such as the HoloLens, can greatly enhance individuals' ability to navigate large-scale environments during emergencies by promoting spatial knowledge acquisition and supporting cognitive mapping.
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Identifying anomalous behavior in a building using HoloLens for emergency response
During emergencies communicating in multi-level built environment becomes challenging because architectural complexity can create problems with visual and mental representation of 3D space. Our Hololens application gives a visual representation of a building on campus in 3D space, allowing people to see where exits are in the building as well as creating alerts for anomalous behavior for emergency response such as active shooter, fire, and smoke. It also gives path to the various exits; shortest path to the exits as well as directions to a safe zone from their current position. The augmented reality (AR) application was developed in Unity 3D for Microsoft HoloLens and also is deployed on tablets and smartphones. It is a fast and robust marker detection technique inspired by the use of Vuforia AR library. Our aim is to enhance the evacuation process by ensuring that all building patrons know all of the building exits and how to get to them, which improves evacuation time and eradicates the injuries and fatalities occurring during indoor crises such as building fires and active shooter events. We have incorporated existing permanent features in the building as markers for the AR application to trigger the floor plan and subsequent location of the person in the building. This work also
describes the system architecture as well as the design and
implementation of this AR application to leverage HoloLens for
building evacuation purposes. We believe that AR technologies like
HoloLens could be adopted for all building evacuating strategies
during emergencies as it offers a more
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- Award ID(s):
- 1923986
- PAR ID:
- 10188805
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Electronic Imaging
- ISSN:
- 2470-1173
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 224-1 to 224-6
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Emergency response in indoor building evacuation is essential for effective rescue and safety management. First responders often lack the situational awareness capability to quickly assess the layout of a building upon initial entry. For occupants of the building, situational awareness becomes more important in cases of active shooter events or circumstances of fire and smoke. One of the challenges is to provide user-specific personalized evacuation routes in real-time. In multilevel building environments, the complexity of the architecture creates problems for both visual and mental representation of the 3D spaces. This paper presents three cutting edge Augmented Reality Instructional (ARI) modules that overcome the visual limitations associated with the traditional, static 2D methods of communicating evacuation plans for multilevel buildings. Using existing building features, the authors demonstrate how the three modules provide contextualized 3D visualizations that promote and support spatial knowledge acquisition and cognitive mapping thereby enhancing situational awareness. These ARI visualizations are developed for first responders and building occupants to help increase emergency preparedness and mitigate the evacuation related risks in multilevel building rescues and safety management. Specifically, the paper describes the design and implementation of the ARI modules and reports the results of the pilot studies conducted to evaluate their perceived usefulness, ease-of-use, and usability. The results suggest the desirability of further heuristic examination of three-dimensional situational awareness-based ARI application effectiveness in multilevel building evacuations.more » « less
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Abstract Background Video‐based training has been widely adopted by private organizations and public authorities to educate occupants on various types of building emergencies. However, the effectiveness of video‐based training for preparing occupants for building emergencies has not been rigorously studied nor has the impact of emergency type been investigated on training effectiveness.
Objectives This study examines whether video‐based training is an effective method to prepare occupants for building emergencies and how the effectiveness differs in the context of different building emergencies.
Methods We simulated fire and active shooter emergencies in a virtual office building and conducted evacuation experiments to examine participants' emergency responses using both objective and subjective metrics. A total of 108 participants were recruited and responded to the fire or active shooter incident with or without video‐based training.
Results and Conclusions The results revealed that participants with video‐based training more often chose to follow other recommendations when responding to building emergencies instead of simply following others. Results from ANOVA showed that training increased participants' self‐efficacy significantly, especially for those in the active shooter group. Moreover, participants in the active shooter simulation had a higher level of response efficacy than those in the fire emergency simulation. Our results also demonstrated the influence of emergency type on participants' final decisions and considerations of the recommendations.
Implications Our results suggested that video‐based training is effective in improving participants' emergency preparedness and changing their behaviour patterns to a certain extent such as reducing following behaviour and encouraging safe evacuations. Additionally, statistically significant interactions between video‐based training and emergency types suggested that training effectiveness should be considered in accordance with the emergency type.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2020.13.ERVR-224
