Mixed-Reality Platform for Coordination and Situation Awareness in Smart Buildings
Elias Mahfoud, Weichao Wang · Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference · 2018
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.