 Hazmat
officers dressed in yellow safety suits pick their way through
the simulated wreckage of a terrorist attack at San Diego’s
Cruise Ship Terminal. They are closely followed by computer-science
graduate student Neil McCurdy, wearing his own emergency gear:
a helmet with a built-in video camera; a wireless modem connecting
him to a mobile command post nearby; a ‘dead-reckoning’ device
on his back to chart his every step; and
a handheld PC with software that turns video from his helmet into
situational awareness for offsite viewers.
McCurdy and his thesis advisor,
Jacobs School of Engineering professor Bill Griswold, call their
new software RealityFlythrough. It mixes images and video feeds
from mobile cameras to provide remote viewers with a virtual window
into a disaster site or any other physical environment.
RealityFlythrough is
one of several technologies demonstrated by more than a dozen scientists
and engineers from UCSD and the California Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology (Calit2) during a county disaster drill
staged by
San Diego’s Metropolitan Medical Strike Team,
in May.
The UCSD participants were all affiliated
with WIISARD (Wireless Internet Information System
for Medical Response in Disasters),
a two-year-old, $4 million project funded by the National Institutes
of Health’s National Library of Medicine.
“We are trying to develop technologies that improve information
flow, so as to help first responders work more seamlessly in the
event of an emergency,” says engineering professor Ramesh
Rao, Calit2’s division director.
— Doug Ramsey
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