Discipline: Computer Sciences and Information Management
Subcategory: Computer Science & Information Systems
Emmanuel Ossuetta - Bowie State University
The megacity project was created as a wide urban space to implement multiple what-if scenarios and possible situation for an emergency evacuation response in a city. This project could be a training ground to help and prepare people to respond in an emergency situation for big cities such as New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, etc. The goal of this project is to create a collaborative virtual reality environment can serve as an educational and training tool for civilians, SWAT teams, fire emergency department, medical department, traffic agents, and other law agency know how to respond during an emergency situation like a building on fire, an attack, an epidemic, or other emergencies. Behaviors which include, how the civilians behave during chaos, how the fire, medical, traffic, police department behave, or in a SWAT team, who takes command of the decision making, who does what, when and where? These are situation that are incorporated in this project to train the user from different perspective in multiple what-if scenarios. Our hypothesis is that the “Sense of presence” created by the VR environment will allow conducting multiple drills and what-if scenarios for emergency response in a mega a city. The method used to address the problem was to create a multi-user virtual environment for emergency evacuation for emergency response and decision making. The collaborative virtual reality environment will allow users to implement different behaviors and triggers during an emergency response like evacuation. We have created an experimental design method for emergency respond environment; which is used as a study of social behavior in a virtual world. For the modeling, we used 3D SketchUp, for the 3D models 3D Megacity Textures, avatars, BMW, Background 3D sound, 3D sound for objects and functionality. Vizard and python programing was used for programing method. Client/server contains functionalities and behaviors for the users. The result of this project will teach the user how to respond during evacuation drills, what-if scenarios and other emergency evacuation situations in a megacity. We also tested the environment using 5-6 clients as avatars. Our findings showed that the avatars were communicating with each other in the collaborative virtual reality environment. They were also able to navigate around the environment as autonomous agents. In conclusion, this environment would serve as a training and educational tool for decision making strategies in a mega city.
References: Sharma, S., Devreaux,P., Scribner, P., Grynovicki, J., Grazaitis, P., Megacity: A Collaborative Virtual Reality Environment for Emergency Response, Training, and Decision Making, Explore the Future of Electronic Imaging at the 29th Annual Symposium, 2017 IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (EI 2017), Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, Burlingame, California, 29 January-2 February 2017.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation for supporting the project. This work is funded by the Grant Award number HRD-1238784.
Faculty Advisor: Sharad Sharma, ssharma@bowiestate.edu
Role: I did all of it.