CoPe EAGER: Creating Interactive Augmented Reality of Extreme Coastal Hazards for Stakeholder Education

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Effective communication of hazards from extreme coastal events, such as tsunamis and hurricanes, is one of the most important components of stakeholder engagement and education. This EAGER project will develop an Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality (AR/MR) platform for the communication of coastal hazards to the broader public. There are preliminary concepts on how a coastal wave simulation model might be developed for various AR platforms, and this effort will investigate the feasibility of such a system. AR hardware options span a wide range of computational ability, from complex and relatively expensive smart glasses (e.g. the Magic Leap One or the Microsoft HoloLens) to smart phones. A truly useful AR tool should be available on a range of hardware options. The research strategy will be to start simple and build complexity. Initially, the project will attempt to use existing hydrodynamic models to create AR visualizations for idealized, small coastal communities. From this task, the project will have a handle on the challenges of geo-referencing the user and the hydrodynamic information, as well as building a topography/building layout/hydrodynamic overlay that can be visualized on available hardware. Next, the project will modify this simple AR layout to allow the hydrodynamics to interact with the environment for example to have a tsunami flow around a building. In the second year of the project, applications will extend to target communities, at least one in the Pacific Northwest and one in the Gulf/East coast. The final task of this project is to visit these communities, demonstrate the created AR and MR applications, and receive feedback for any future development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.