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Collaborative Virtual Environment for Training Emergency Response Officials and Civilians in Big City Using Unity 3D Gaming Engine

Undergraduate #50
Discipline: Computer Sciences and Information Management
Subcategory: Education

Phillip Devreaux - Bowie State University


Throughout history, there have been attacks in big cities, and these attacks have caused many casualties and destruction. This CVE (collaborative virtual environment) will serve as a platform that will be capable of virtually training emergency response officials and civilians in big city catastrophes. This project is important because it is critical that people know how to respond in the event of a gunman attack, a fire and smoke situation, or a bombing. The methods used to create this training platform were the use of the following programs: Google SketchUP, Unity 3D, and the C# coding language. Google SketchUP was used to provide a template virtual city environment with fundamental structures that included buildings with 2D textures, and streets. We then used the tools provided by the Google SketchUp application to sculpt buildings into 3D form, and to add premade vehicles, road signs, and traffic light 3D models to our environment. After adding 3D models to our environment, we exported the environment from Google SketchUp and imported the environment into the Unity 3D application. Next, while in Unity 3D, we added realistic trees, statues, rocks, benches, wind, fire, smoke, humanoid characters, and a sky to add realism to the environment. We then used the C# language to add functionality to traffic lights, police lights, simulation GUI menus, and humanoid behaviors. All of the variables and elements placed in this project resulted in a life-like environment equipped with multiple training modes, multi-user functionality, and a fully immersive experience with the use of Oculus Rift. With these results, we found that users who have never experienced a catastrophe before were able to become familiar with the fear, urgency, and decision making feelings associated with a person in a catastrophic scenario. In conclusion, this project will serve as a experimental platform for virtually training emergency response officials and civilians in big city catastrophes. Future work will include adding full city training scenarios, aerial training to train aerial emergency response officials, medical drills for the wounded during catastrophes, bomb locating and defusing drills, and emergency response vehicle formation drills.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation for supporting the project. This work is funded by NSF grant HRD-1238784.

Faculty Advisor: Sharad Sharma, ssharma@bowiestate.edu

Role: Building and testing

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. DUE-1930047. Any opinions, findings, interpretations, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of its authors and do not represent the views of the AAAS Board of Directors, the Council of AAAS, AAAS’ membership or the National Science Foundation.

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