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.
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This content will become publicly available on December 13, 2024
Situational Awareness and Feature Extraction for Indoor Building Navigation using Mixed Reality
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 However, there is a lack of spatial data for indoor environments, including outdated floor plans and limited real-time operational data.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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- PAR ID:
- 10544801
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-6151-3
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1000 to 1005
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Las Vegas, NV, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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