Situational Awareness and Feature Extraction for Indoor Building Navigation using Mixed Reality

Indoor navigation in complex building environments poses significant challenges, particularly for individuals who are unfamiliar with their surroundings. Mixed reality (MR) technologies have emerged as a promising solution to enhance situational awareness and facilitate navigation within indoor spaces. However, there is a lack of spatial data for indoor environments, including outdated floor plans and limited real-time operational data. This paper presents the development of a mixed-reality application for indoor building navigation and evacuation. The application uses feature extraction for location sensing and situational awareness to provide accurate and reliable navigation in any indoor environment using Microsoft HoloLens. The application can track the user's position and orientation and give the user-specific information on how to evacuate the building. This information is then used to generate navigation instructions for the user. We demonstrate how this mixed reality HoloLens application can provide spatially contextualized 3D visualizations that promote spatial knowledge acquisition and situational awareness. These 3D visualizations are developed as an emergency evacuation and navigation tool to aid the building occupants in safe and quick evacuation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the application, providing 3D visualizations of multilevel spaces and aiding individuals in understanding their position and evacuation path during emergencies. We believe that adopting mixed reality technologies, such as the HoloLens, can greatly enhance individuals' ability to navigate large-scale environments during emergencies by promoting spatial knowledge acquisition and supporting cognitive mapping.