There is a need to prepare for emergencies such as active shooter events. Emergency response training drills and exercises are necessary to train for such events as we are unable to predict when emergencies do occur. There has been progress in understanding human behavior, unpredictability, human motion synthesis, crowd dynamics, and their relationships with active shooter events, but challenges remain. This paper presents an immersive security personnel training module for active shooter events in an indoor building. We have created an experimental platform for conducting active shooter drills for training that gives a fully immersive feel of the situation and allow one to perform virtual evacuation drills. The security personnel training module also incorporates four sub-modules namely 1) Situational assessment module, 2) Individual officer intervention module, 3) Team Response Module, and 4) Rescue Task Force module. We have developed an immersive virtual reality training module for active shooter events using an Oculus for course of action, visualization, and situational awareness for active shooter events as shown in Fig.1. The immersive security personnel training module aims to get information about the emergency situation inside the building. The dispatched officer will verify the active shooter situation in the building. The security personnel should find a safe zone in the building and secure the people in that area. The security personnel should also find the number and location of persons in possible jeopardy. Upon completion of the initial assessment, the first security personnel shall advise communications and request resources as deemed necessary. This will allow determining whether to take immediate action alone or with another officer or wait until additional resources are available. After successfully gathering the information, the personnel needs to update the info to their officer through a communication device.
Situational awareness provides the decision making capability to identify, process, and comprehend big data. In our approach, situational awareness is achieved by integrating and analyzing multiple aspects of data using stacked bar graphs and geographic representations of the data. We provide a data visualization tool to represent COVID pandemic data on top of the geographical information. The combination of geospatial and temporal data provides the information needed to conduct situational analysis for the COVTD-19 pandemic. By providing interactivity, geographical maps can be viewed from different perspectives and offer insight into the dynamical aspects of the COVTD-19 pandemic for the fifty states in the USA. We have overlaid dynamic information on top of a geographical representation in an intuitive way for decision making. We describe how modeling and simulation of data increase situational awareness, especially when coupled with immersive virtual reality interaction. This paper presents an immersive virtual reality (VR environment and mobile environment for data visualization using Oculus Rift head-mounted display and smartphones. This work combines neural network predictions with human-centric situational awareness and data analytics to provide accurate, timely, and scientific strategies in combatting and mitigating the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Testing and evaluation of the data visualization tool have been done with realtime feed of COVID pandemic data set for immersive environment, non-immersive environment, and mobile environment.
Healthcare practitioners, social workers, and care coordinators must work together seamlessly, safely and efficiently. Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, understanding relevant evidence-based and best practices as well as identification of barriers and facilitators of care for vulnerable populations are of crucial importance. A current gap exists in the lack of specific training for these specialized personnel to facilitate care for socially vulnerable populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities. With continuing advancements in technology, VR based training incorporates real-life experience and creates a "sense of presence" in the environment. Furthermore, immersive virtual environments offer considerable advantages over traditional training exercises such as reduction in the time and cost for different what-if scenarios and opportunities for more frequent practice. This paper proposes the development of Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) training modules geared for COVID-19 testing. The VRI modules are developed for immersive, non-immersive, and mobile environment. This paper describes the development and testing of the VRI module using the Unity gaming engine These VRI modules are developed to help increase safety preparedness and mitigate the social distancing related risks for safety management.
During active shooter events or emergencies, the ability of security personnel to respond appropriately to the situation is driven by pre-existing knowledge and skills, but also depends upon their state of mind and familiarity with similar scenarios. Human behavior becomes unpredictable when it comes to making a decision in emergency situations. The cost and risk of determining these human behavior characteristics in emergency situations is very high. This paper presents an immersive collaborative virtual reality (VR) environment for performing virtual building evacuation drills and active shooter training scenarios using Oculus Rift headmounted displays. The collaborative immersive environment is implemented in Unity 3D and is based on run, hide, and fight mode for emergency response. The immersive collaborative VR environment also offers a unique method for training in emergencies for campus safety. The participant can enter the collaborative VR environment setup on the cloud and participate in the active shooter response training environment, which leads to considerable cost advantages over large-scale real-life exercises. A presence questionnaire in the user study was used to evaluate the effectiveness of our immersive training module. The results show that a majority of users agreed that their sense of presence was increased when using the immersive emergency response training module for a building evacuation environment.