Richard J. Prinz

Between 2. and 4. October 2014 the 2nd IDIRA large scale crisis and disaster management exercise in Dresden and Görlitz / Germany took place. Organizations of different countries (DE, AT, GR, PL …) tested various IDIRA components in a flooding scenario.

During this excercise first tests using Google Glass for disaster relief field forces to send and receive alerts using the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) were performed very successful. Field forces can easily report alerts (including current position, pictures, text informations and a severity) and send them to the IDIRA common operational picture backend where the will be graphically visualized on a map. Also alerts from other sources are relayed to corresponding forces where these alerts will be displayed on Google Glass.

Hands free operation using speech recognition for controlling the Glass app and capturing alert texts was surprisingly good even in a noisy environment. The battery life was average.

The standard Glass features like taking photos , videos to document a disaster scene or navigating to and from an alert position have also been extensively used and tested for their practicality.

New tests will take place at the 3rd training in Athens in November.