Geospatial Mobile Application for Emergency Response and Management
Research in the Data Visualization and eXtended Reality (DVXR) Lab at the University of North Texas, led by Dr. Sharad Sharma. I was one of the student researchers on the project, alongside Andrew Summitt.
Goal
Develop and evaluate a geospatial mobile application for navigation and emergency response on the UNT campus, using Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Cesium for Unity (which combines Cesium’s 3D geospatial capabilities and 3D Tiles with the Unity ecosystem).
Objectives
- Geospatial AR navigation: a phone app that makes wayfinding more intuitive by showing location-based content on a 3D model of the user’s surroundings, aligned with the real world.
- Emergency information: assembly points, exits and weather shelter locations shown in AR.
- Digital twin: visualizing geospatial data for the UNT campus with Cesium and Unity 3D.
- Point clouds: point cloud visualization in VR or AR with labeling and annotation, preserving more metadata via 3D Tiles, and testing on headsets such as HoloLens 2, Magic Leap 2, Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3.
- Generative AI: exploring ChatGPT-style integration to aid navigation and emergency response.
The lab’s project page has demo videos, screenshots and the project poster.