COMMUNICATING LANDSLIDE RISK THROUGH AUGMENTED REALITY

It is hard enough for a geologist or engineer to look up or down through a forest and to recognize landslide hazard, and thereby risk, in a meaningful way. It is much harder for people not trained to do so. This inability to see the problem and how it interacts with existing or planned infrastructure is a barrier to implementing risk reduction strategies that are based on landslide inventories and hazard and risk assessments. Augmented reality provides the opportunity to remove barriers and improve understanding. This comes through the ability to immerse in a 3-D space and to remove content from the actual reality, or to add elements that don’t actually exist. Importantly, this is done in a shared environment and not by an individual. The value will be demonstrated through live simulcasting of a hypothetical case history of route selection through terrain with landslide inventories and assessments using the Ada Platform software and a Microsoft HoloLens.

The audience and speaker will share an experience looking at a room-scale hologram of aerial imagery, lidar terrain models and oblique aerial photography point clouds, and with a landslide inventory superimposed. The experience will look at proposed new designs to mitigate risk, and draw out comparisons, and then will proceed underground to look at the subsurface investigation of one potential landslide. The result will be improved understanding of the challenges, risks and preferred mitigations – and something much more uniformly understood by engineers, geologists, decision and policy makers, and the general public.