Search for: All records

Emergency response, navigation, and evacuation are key essentials for effective rescue and safety management. Situational awareness is a key ingredient when fire responders or emergency response personnel responds to an emergency. They have to quickly assess the layout of a building or a campus upon entry. Moreover, the occupants of a building or campus also need situational awareness for navigation and emergency response. We have developed an integrated situational awareness mobile augmented reality (AR) application for smart campus planning, management, and emergency response. Through the visualization of integrated geographic information systems and real-time data analysis, our mobile application provides insights into operational implications and offers information to support effective decision-making. Using existing building features, the authors demonstrate how the mobile AR application provides contextualized 3D visualizations that promote and support spatial knowledge acquisition and cognitive mapping thereby enhancing situational awareness. A limited user study was conducted to test the effectiveness of the proposed mobile AR application using the mobile phone usability questionnaire (MPUQ) framework. The results show that the mobile AR application was relatively easy to use and that it can be considered a useful application for navigation and evacuation.