For an extra credit opportunity for SRA 231, teams of three signed up to be a part of the NeoCITIES experiment within the College of IST MINDS group. The MINDS group is an interdisciplinary department focusing on the “intersection of the cognitive sciences, social psychology, and the engineering of cognitive/collaborative systems.” One of this group’s projects is NeoCITIES, an emergency response simulation game that shows researchers how team members communicate and solve problems collaboratively, especially under stressful situations that require quick decisions.

NeoCITIES has recently been rebuilt on Adobe Flex and has a sleek, cartoony interface that looks like Sim City. See the screenshot below.

The simulation is divided among three participants: Police, Fire, Hazmat. Each of these departments has different resources available such as SWAT or Bomb Squad. The point of the game is to respond to events by finding the location, communicating with the team via text chat, and allocating appropriate resources. The software is driven by a Google Maps-style pan-and-zoom interface. In this case, we used a crisp satellite map of State College, PA that was being fed from the Geography department’s servers.

NeoCITIES is targeted as a research platform to study crisis management at a civilian level. NeoCITIES is part of a research initiative called the Geo-Collaborative Crisis Management. Collaborators include the Port Authority of NY/NJ and other similar agencies.

NeoCITIES still has some kinks to work out, but that’s what our class signed up for, to provide feedback on the interface along with providing more data sets for the researchers to crunch.

The above researcher mentioned that one of the goals for NeoCITIES is to create an “immersive environment” where the participant gets sucked into the reality of the simulation. I think NeoCITIES still a lot to work on in that area, because it lacks any sounds or animations. The text chat feature made me feel like I was playing a bootleg version of Starcraft multiplayer. And the navigation and the method of creating “annotations,” which points other team members to an event location, are currently very inefficient.

I’d like to see what the researchers working on NeoCITIES have learned from the data gathered from the several teams of our SRA 231 class. More on this later.

The researchers for the NeoCITIES project include:

• Dr. Michael D. McNeese
• Dr. Susan Mohammed
• Dr. Alan MacEachren
• Bimal Balakrishnan
• Varun Adibhatla
• Mark S. Pfaff
• Dr. Isaac Brewer
• Brian Tomaszewski

Tags: minds, neocities

Categories: Research