A disaster safety system that used Augmented Reality to provide accessible location information to users and law enforcement in times of need.
"Our team has always dreamed of creating a full-stack Augmented Reality application. However, to make that dream come true over the past 36 hours, our team members have been having significantly fewer dreams than usual."
Our team was largely inspired by the tragic events of the MSU active shooting incident. This event brought to light how our current systems to handle these devastating events can often lead to misinformation, distrust, and inefficiency.
Additionally, our team found that these disastrous events can disproportionately affect people with disabilities. Because of this, our team proposes a new system that makes indoor localization (and evacuation) much more accessible when sight is limited.
One of the main features of Quick Action is the ability to localize the user in a room, and create a custom AR map to the nearest exit of the building. This system was designed to be extremely assesible to all users, especially the vision impared. Our app guides the user through the environment through detailed spoken instructions and visual cues based on the users current position.
Our team also implemented a fully-integrated person-counting system for lockdown situations. In this system, users are able to report specific locations that they are currently sheltering in place in which can be used as extra information by law enforcement. Users are able to "panic" which signals the 911 dispatcher that they are in distress. Additionally, a backend was fully implemented that allows the 911 dispatcher to sort and signal groups of people with important rescue information.
Our team has always dreamed of creating a full-stack Augmented Reality application. However, to make that dream come true over the past 36 hours, our team members have been having significantly fewer dreams than usual.
Our project uses Apple's ARKit and Google Firebase extensively. Our team members specialized in what was most interesting to them (no necessarily what they knew the most about) and tackled the project piece by piece.
There were plenty of challenges that our team faced during this project. Our team typically found that when integrating our changes together, small issues would present themselves that would consume a large amount of time (merge conflicts, tricky bugs, etc). On a few occasions, we got to play detective. trying to figure out what specific event caused a bug to be exposed in our code. This process was very enlightening and fun! (more so when you find the solution.)
Our team found a significant challenge in adapting to the ARKit framework that we did not have much experience in. The documentation for the software was decent, however, the amount of examples that our team could find online made it more of a challenge.
One of our biggest accomplishments in this project is the focus and success of our product for assessability in indoor navigation. Through extensive testing and development, our team honed in on a ARKit solution with incredibly high fidelity and accuracy at navigating users through indoor environments by visual cues and speech guidance. This component of making technology more accessible for everyone (especially in evacuation/disaster situations) is one that is largely overlooked and we believe that technology can be leveraged in this area to make people's lives easier.
Another accomplishment that we are really proud of is our method of transferring important data from the users (through reports) to the 911 dispatch operators. Through the use of Firebase, our team was able to login, make requests, store user information, and instantly integrate that data into a live dashboard that the dispatcher can take advantage of. This systematic and reliable process gives us hope that a system like ours can be used to prevent some level of danger in future disastrous scenarios.
Our team had no shortage of interesting frameworks to learn or problems to tackle. In fact, some of our members were introduced into IOS development for the first time this weekend! Additionally, our team made strides in git version control, and a plethora of new frameworks needed to create a full-stack application.
