First responders engage in highly stressful situations at the emergency site that may induce stress, fear, panic and a collapse of clear thinking. Staying cognitively under control under these circumstances is a necessary condition to avoid useless risk-taking and particularly to provide accurate situation reports to organize appropriate support in time. This work-in-progress applied a flexible virtual reality (VR) training environment to investigate the performance of reporting under rather realistically simulated mission conditions. In a pilot study, representative emergency forces of the Austrian volunteer fire brigade and paramedics of the Johanniter organization participated in an exploratory pilot study that tested a formalized reporting schema (LEDVV), applying equivalent stress in both, (i) real (physical strain) and non-immersive (cognitive strain), and (ii) fully immersive training environments. Wearable psychophysiological measuring technology was applied to estimate the cognitive-emotional stress level under both training conditions. The results indicate that situation reports achieve a high level of cognitive-emotional stress and should be thoroughly trained. Furthermore, the results motivate the use of VR environments for the training of stress-resilient decision-making behavior of emergency forces.

We present the VROnSite platform that enables immersive training of first responder on-site squad leaders. Our training platform is fully immersive, entirely untethered to ease use and provides two means of navigation - abstract and natural walking - to simulate stress and exhaustion, two important factors for decision making. With the platform's capabilities, we close a gap in prior art for first responder training. Our research is closely interlocked with stakeholders from fire brigades and paramedics to gather early feedback in an iterative design process. In this paper, we present our first research results, which are the system's design rationale, the single user training prototype and results from a preliminary user study.

We investigate in this work users' perceptions of interacting with invisible, zero-weight digital matter for smart mobile scenarios. To this end, we introduce the concept of a digital vibron as vibrational manifestation of a digital object located outside its container device. We exemplify gesture-based interactions for digital vibrons and show how thinking about interactions in terms of digital vibrons can lead to new interactive experiences in the physical-digital space. We present the results of a user study that showed high scores of users' perceived experience, usability, and desirability, and we discuss users' preferences for vibration patterns to inform the design of vibrotactile feedback for digital vibrons. We hope that this work will inspire researchers and practitioners to further explore and develop digital vibrons to design localized vibrotactile feedback for digital objects outside their smart devices toward new interactive experiences in the physical-digital space.

Precise localization for mobile Augmented Reality in large indoor environments without specific tracking infrastructure is challenging. This is especially true for rooms with changing properties, like lighting, seating and carpeting. With these constraints a map for a vision based tracking approach has to be continuously updated. The Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM) algorithm is capable of generating and extending a map while tracking the camera pose in an unknown environment. However, it has originally been designed for small workspace environments and has therefore certain limitations. We have extended and modified the original implementation in order to ensure efficient and robust map generation and tracking in large rooms. Furthermore, we have tested a mobile setup with the system in Festsaal in Vienna's Hofburg, which is close to thousand square meters in size. The user's position and path was tracked while the environment was augmented with virtual objects and the system was successfully tested for robustness and occlusions.

Fire fighting remains a dangerous profession despite many recent technological and organizational measures. Sensors and technical systems can augment the performance of fire fighters and increase safety and efficiency during operation. An important aspect in that context is the awareness of location, structure and thermal properties of the environment. This work focuses on the design and development of a mobile system, which can reconstruct a 3d model of a building's interior structure in real-time and fuses the visualization with the image of a thermal camera. In addition, the position and viewing direction of the fire fighter within the model is determined and a thermal map can be generated from the gathered data. This helps an operational commander to provide accurate instructions to his men during a mission. First tests with our system in different situations showed good results, being able to reconstruct different larger scenes and create thermal maps thereof.

The ability to guide human motion through automatically generated feedback has significant potential for applications in areas, such as motor learning, human-computer interaction, telepresence, and augmented reality.