Armed with homeland security grants totaling $950,000 a group of Scripps College of Communication students meticulously photographed the interiors of 10 buildings chosen by local homeland security officials as having political, private-sector or utility significance or are heavily populated.
What resulted in IVIN is a software program that could allow first responders to view from a police cruiser or fire truck using a cell card or other wireless technology, a virtual, 3-D blueprint of the inside of the buildings in and a database of critical information, such as which doors remain locked, what chemicals are present, what construction materials were used and where people are located throughout the building.
“It’s about giving total awareness to the incident commander,” said the university’s director of the gaming design lab, John Bowditch, who inspired the creation of the program.
Bowditch noted that finding an up-to-date blueprint of a building is rare and that having one would make things much safer for first responders entering a building where visibility might be almost nonexistent. “If you can check off rooms or know that a squad member has already cleared a room and it doesn’t need to be checked again it would speed up everything and make everyone’s job safer.”
Bowditch said the students shot “somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 terabytes worth of photos” and got them all processed in under half a gigabyte. “We know that emergency responders are not going to have the highest-speed communications available to them,” he said.
He said the program is easy to use and they’re working on making it affordable. “We designed it to be controlled by one keystroke and either a mouse or a track pad. Ultimately we’re abandoning the desktop version for tablet devices.”
The Tricky Part
The group is now working on giving every member of a first responder team the power of situational awareness through the ability to access the program from a mobile device. And of course, the group is trying to develop a way to keep the information current.“That’s the tricky part,” Bowditch said. “It’s the same problem with the blueprint. Whenever somebody does structural modification we have to reshoot that part.” He said a solution to the problem may lie with giving police and fire the ability to update the photos themselves.
“If we can figure out a way for the police department or fire department to reshoot it and have it entered seamlessly with little effort on their end, that’s what we’re hoping for,” Bowditch said.
Another hope is that the program becomes a model for first responder communities around the country. Right now, the server is being moved from its original home at the university to the Franklin County Sheriff’s office in Columbus. The plan is to use it as a training tool for Columbus police and Franklin County SWAT, according to Bill McKendry, consultant for the Franklin County Office of Homeland Security Justice Programs.
“We feel that not only will these first responder units be able to use IVIN to tour and thus become familiar with IVIN sites but also use IVIN to set up scenarios where unit leaders would be asked to show how they would use their personnel in a mock emergency situation,” McKendry said through email.
“It’s a rehearsal. You can go in and create a scenario,” said Jean Marie Cackowski-Campbell, research grants and projects development coordinator for Scripps College of Communication. “A bomb on the fourth floor; what evacuation routes would you use to get people out?”
Cackowski-Campbell said the students were recruited among those studying photo journalism, media arts and studies, and those studying how to make documentaries. The students first had to learn to use the camera equipment and how to shoot a room without missing angles.
“You have to get all four sides of a table, for instance,” she said. “They would take pictures, put them on a camera card, upload them and look at them before we left the facility. Sometimes we had to send students back because they missed a cubby hole or something.”
Students all underwent background checks and agreed to certain provisions to keep some information from the public.
