Emergency Response Using HoloLens for Building Evacuation

Abstract

Emergency response in indoor building evacuation is needed for rescue and safety management. One of the challenges is to provide user-specific personalized evacuation routes in real time. Early hands-on experiences with the Microsoft HoloLens augmented/mixed reality device have given promising results for building evacuation applications. A range of use cases are tested, including data visualization and immersive data spaces, in-situ visualization of 3D models and full-scale architectural form visualization. We present how the mixed reality technology can provide spatial contextualized 3D visualization that promotes knowledge acquisition and support cognitive mapping. Our HoloLens application gives a visual representation of a building in 3D space, allowing people to see where exits are in the building. It also gives a path to the various exits; a shortest path to the exits as well as directions to a safe zone from their current position. This paper describes the system architecture and implementation of the augmented reality application to leverage the Microsoft HoloLens for emergency response during a building evacuation. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our Microsoft HoloLens application in an emergency evacuation by offering 3D visualizations of multilevel spaces while adding the spatial context that allows the individual to better understand their position and evacuation path when evacuation is necessary. We believe that AR technologies like HoloLens could be adopted by people for building evacuating during emergencies as it offers enriched experience in navigating large-scale environments.