A Brief History of How We Arrived at RealityVision 2.5
In our continuing development and enhancement of RealityVision we have made every effort to create technology that meets our customer needs. RealityVision 1.0 built a foundation for sharing video and other visual information in operational environments. RealityVision 2.0 and its first point release addressed our customers’ information security needs for the mobile world in which they operate. With this foundation in place, we now turn to the exciting side of software development: new feature development and enhancing existing features for our customers.
We have often been asked how additional dynamic visual information can be integrated into the system. For example, could a field services engineer use RealityVision to see remote pressure gauges on his cellular phone to quickly and correctly diagnose costly equipment malfunction? We found that some organizations literally pointed a video camera at a PC screen where these gauges and other sensors were rendering their readings. Our solution is RealityVision Screencast, which allows you to define regions of a PC screen that are then transmitted live throughout a RealityVision system. Screencasts appear as camera feeds and are accessible by anyone who needs to see them wherever they may be.
Over the past few months we have previewing Screencasting on a confidential basis to a small number of different groups and each immediately finds uses for the feature – sharing plume modeling, walking off-site supervisors through complex information that cannot be easily shared in any single document, and sharing blue force tracking.
RealityVision Screencast is at the core of the RealityVision 2.5 release, whose other features include:
- RealityVision Mobile for BlackBerry Smartphones.We now support many BlackBerry devices, including the Bold, the Curve and the World Edition. Among other features, RealityVision Mobile will allow your BlackBerry users to:
- Automatically receive live video streams and other tailored data such as alerts, still photos, maps and schematics.
- Automatically report their GPS position into the RealityVision system.
- Independently access any live video source being created through the RealityVision system.
- Initiate a one-button silent alert for immediate attention. Automatically, the device will seek to establish and report its GPS location and will dial a predetermined phone number in speakerphone mode to allow for an immediate conversation with the right personnel.
- Enhanced GPS Tracking Options. The RealityVision management console allows you to choose your preferred mapping environment to visualize all your tracked personnel and video sources. Out-of-the box, select Microsoft Virtual Earth (2D or 3D), Google Earth or Google Maps, or integrate your own customized display.
- Enhanced Access to Network Cameras. The system now supports the use of additional video formats and camera types when selecting fixed or mobile network cameras to be viewed within your RealityVision network by your authorized users.
These features enhance our product’s value to our customers in many ways, including:
- New sources of information can be distributed through RealityVision. Almost any information that can be rendered on a PC screen can now be seen as though it was a live camera feed via RealityVision Screencast. Live sensor data and video feeds from the web or a DVD playing on the PC are just a few of the new video sources that Screencasting makes available to RealityVision users anywhere they may be. By broadening the formats and types of network cameras that can be included in the system’s camera catalog our customers can include almost any video source they already have in place.
- A new platform to view information is now available with RealityVision Mobile for BlackBerry Smartphones. The BlackBerry is the most widely deployed Smartphone among organizations and RealityVision Mobile will allow customers to use equipment they already have to receive information and track their users.
- New tracking options can be used in the Management Console. GPS tracking is an enormously important component of RealityVision to our customers. They now can choose the display option that best meets their needs from Microsoft or Google.