Discipline: Computer Sciences and Information Management
Subcategory: Computer Science & Information Systems
Darren Sumpter - Bowie State University
Emergencies can happen anytime in an urban city environment. Emergencies can occur in multiple ways such as bomb /explosion, fire/smoke, biohazard, and major traffic accident. We have developed an experimental design approach for creating a collaborative virtual reality environment (CVE). The goal of this project is to develop a CVE to perform multiple what-if scenarios in a big crowded city for traffic navigation. The CVE will help in conducting multiple virtual evacuation drills and what if scenarios for different emergency situations. The study will give insight regarding how to respond in emergency situations. It is a social study of observing human behavior in emergency situations in VR. Our Hypothesis is that the ‘sense of presence’ developed in CVE will help gain better knowledge of how to respond to an emergency situation.
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: There were three phases in the implantation of our CVE. Modeling a city environment in Sketchup, Programming city traffic in Unity 3D, and Testing the Collaborative Virtual Environment on a Photon Network. We have tested our CVE environment using 3-4 clients. Our results show that our propped CVE environment could act as a training and educational tool for emergency response and decision making. In conclusion, this application has a dual purpose. The CVE may be used for training and educational purposes in both immersive and no-immersive environment. The future work will involve conducting user studies for the CVE environment after getting the IRB approval.