Covering future modeling and simulation needs
 Homeland Security (HS) applications have to face new challenges. The first and most important one is the ever-increasing number of possible targets. These targets can be located in urban or industrial areas, and they can range from small buildings to large industrial infrastructures.
VRcontext technology federates all the relevant information about these environments and merges it in a highly immersive and responsive virtual model, connected with all the sensors, video sources, documents, schemas, and drawings.
This massive amount of information can be accessed from a single centralized location (command and control room, crisis center, security center, and control room), enabling operators to optimize infrastructure and HS operations. HS solutions are typically installed in remote centers—away from operating sites—for protection should a catastrophic incident or attack occur.
The virtual model can be connected to existing applications in a unidirectional or bidirectional mode, meaning that the virtual model becomes the single access channel to the information or command, or that it can be interrogated or modified from a remote external application, respectively.
Most critical infrastructures are designed using 3D CAD systems. The VRcontext solution represents a breakthrough by enabling real-time visualization of these 3D CAD models. In addition, these models can be created from multiple inputs that originated from different CAD software programs, and they can be enhanced with 3D digital terrain models, draped with aerial or satellite photography.
When 3D CAD models are not available, laser scanning technology can be used, even intensively, and the merging of point-cloud data can be viewed directly as is in the virtual environment. For laser scanning point clouds, VRcontext has developed a unique consolidation and optimization technology that directly benefits Homeland Security applications.
The virtual environment can be enhanced with the addition of multiple tags, spatially located and assigned to points of view or to (moving) objects.
From within the virtual environment, examples of live interactions with the real-time sensors acquisition system and other data include:
From external applications, interactions can include jumping to a tag in a virtual environment and activating object behavior.
VRcontext has connectors to third-party applications for wireless sensors, people location , intelligent video analysis for behavior detection , alarm thresholding , document management , and environment reconstruction .
The VRcontext solution is built with .NET and allows easy integration of service-oriented architectures. Information data sets are stored in XML files and can easily be exchanged between working sites.
Network capability allows multiple users to move independently in the same virtual environments; or with the IBM DCV application, multiple users can watch the same view in real time and take the lead ‘on the fly’ to drive the session. |
