A Review on the use of Augmented Reality to Generate Safety Awareness and Enhance Emergency Response
Augmented reality applications annotate real world with computer generated graphics. They make the surrounding environment interactive by overlaying digital 3D models or some plain text information over and around the tangible objects in its radius. Augmented reality finds its uses in many diverse fields; one such field is discussed in this paper: Safety. This review paper has conducted a study on various existing augmented reality systems that have been successful in implementing a way to provide the user with the knowledge pertaining to safety practices or parting knowledge to the user when it comes to learning how to react in case of emergencies. The ARLIST project (F. Pretto et al, 2008) focused on enhancing Life Support training by projecting audio and visual content on manikins in an attempt to provide a realistic scenario for the trainees. To generate safety awareness in an earthquake prone country Japan; an augmented furniture falling simulation was implemented by generating 3D furniture models onto strategically placed markers in real environment. An in car augmented reality system was designed for averting possible collisions with surrounding environment and pedestrians and A computer vision based tracking method was used to realise an augmented reality application that could enhance the safety for jobs involving physical danger (like construction jobs) backed by a method of information presentation. The paper concludes with establishing the need for a comprehensive system that incorporates both safety awareness and safety training instead of just one of these pair of features.