PostDisaster – XR tools for assessing environmental disasters, planning related measures, and damage assessment

Abstract

Environmental disasters, particularly earthquakes and floods, present immense challenges to humanity, demanding effective assessment and comprehensive management strategies. Given the increasing frequency and intensity of such events, their devastating impact on lives, the environment, and infrastructure calls for innovative approaches. Earthquakes can devastate entire urban areas within seconds, while flood events can also have long-term effects on the environment and livelihoods. Conventional disaster management methodologies often result in inefficient use of resources and suboptimal decision-making due to inadequate, near real-time, and cost-effective damage assessment capabilities. To address this critical gap, this paper introduces PostDisaster, an innovative platform designed to enhance disaster management and assessment and strengthen the resilience of the affected regions through the deployment of Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), AI-supported satellite analysis, and drone-based tools. To overcome current technological limitations, the PostDisaster system provides decision-makers with tools for action planning and detailed damage analysis, delivering critical data at varying levels of detail. An AI-supported satellite image analysis tool delivers an immediate, macroscopic overview of the disaster’s scope. To obtain a more accurate overview of the situation, a drone-based tool generates a highly detailed 3D reconstruction of the affected area. which can be viewed in VR to enable decision-makers remote assessment of the situation and planning of measures. Finally, an on-site MR application allows users to walk through damaged infrastructure, mark damages and reconstruct the infrastructure. The reconstructed infrastructure with the marked damages can be subsequently viewed as digital representation in VR, ensuring comprehensive traceability of decisions for e.g., mission evaluations, debriefings or insurance assessments. This paper describes the current state of the PostDisaster system and the outcomes of the requirements analysis phase.