PSCR August 2017 Quarterly Newsletter 

$50,000 Awarded to NIST Virtual Public Safety Test Environment Challenge Winners

In June, PSCR announced the winners of the NIST Virtual Public Safety Test Environment Challenge – a competition to design a physical measurement environment that  uses immersive virtual reality tools for testing critical first responder technologies. In just 60 days, the challenge generated a following of over 700, culminating in 103 registered competitors via the HeroX  community.

Six winners were selected from a diverse pool of entries. The winning submissions provided viable and creative solutions for designing a measurement environment for accurate and repeatable testing of new interfaces and technologies for public safety.

First Place –  Jason Jerald, NextGen Interactions for FirstSimVR, a versatile VR system that can be configured for specific first-responder scenarios in order to prototype, evaluate, and inform improved design of early virtual and physical prototypes.

Second Place –  Zach Huber, Design Interactive, for a Reconfigurable Vehicle Training System, a mixed reality environment within reconfigurable cars.

Third Place – UNSN  for MultiVRse – parallel physical and VR universes, with auto VR visualisation matching the physical space, untethered and unbounded VR, interactions with real & VR objects which will capture full body movement up to each individual figure with no external cameras or sensors.

Fourth Place – Kirk McKinzie, Cosumnes Fire Department, for their idea of an Augmented Reality Emergency Response System, a multi-sensor based, indoor positioning technology to simulate a first responder emergency situation through a wearable SMART device.

Crowd Voting Award – Variable Labs  for their submission “The Future is Hidden in the Success of the Past,” highlighting the need to leverage interoperable standards to define a high-level architecture to establish a baseline for interaction modalities and biometric feedback datasets in order to provide a path to creating key performance indicators (KPI) which can help measure system performance and define future enhancements.

Honorable Mention – John Quarles and his team from  MedCognition, received the Honorable Mention award for PerSim, a realistic, portable, and lower cost solution to train first responders using augmented reality simulation.

Open Innovation is an essential element to PSCR’s strategy. This challenge represents the first in a series of crowdsourcing opportunities. PSCR will continue to seek out solvers and innovators that can help to advance public safety communications and accelerate the adoption of critical technologies through creative ideas and smart solutions.

For more information on PSCR Open Innovation, the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) award of $38.5 million to 33 research and development (R&D) projects aimed at advancing broadband communications technologies for first responder, and to stay up-to-date on open opportunities, visit the PSCR website.