Interacting with a virtual Destroyed Environment constructed from real disaster data

Abstract

A Destroyed Environment (DE) is created by disastrous events in the built environment. DEs typically consist of the structures created from the rubble of collapsed buildings-forming a chaotic, unplanned and unmapped environment in which emergency first responders must find the surviving occupants who may now be trapped and hidden within. The more knowledge that search teams have concerning the resulting DE, the better they are equipped to plan and rescue survivors. We present the Disaster Scene Representation system that is able to employ scanned spatial data from a DE and creates a Simulated Environment (SE) that is spatially accurate, allows actions to be preplanned in the DE and is safe to work with. The system provides functionality that allows first responders to perform virtual structural inspections, allowing them the ability to plan and, to a certain extent, test actions in the simulated environment. The goal of this research is to demonstrate that the functionality within our SE can be used to preplan actions in the DE.