The Big Board

Overview

In the Emergency Operations Center of the future, situational awareness will be of primary importance. RENCI is building a real-time collaborative virtual environment for large images and maps, tentatively called The Big Board (a reference to the film Dr. Strangelove). Users create a virtual conference room on top of a map and annotate it in real time; all changes are broadcast to all users in the same conference room. Annotations are rich. A user clicking on an annotation can be taken anywhere on the Web, can add content inside the conference room’s private Wiki, and can link together two places on the same or different maps.

The system is designed to be mobile and to work well on old computers. It will shine on the best current hardware, including RENCI’s multi-touch display table.

Project Team

Jeff Heard

Partner

RENCI Disaster Studies Group