Towards an Augmented Reality Application to Support Civil Defense in Visualizing the Susceptibility of Flooding Risk in Brazilian Urban Areas

This paper presents an augmented reality application for visualizing floods in urban environments, aiming to raise awareness people about occupied areas susceptible to flooding, based on historical occurrences. Environmental disasters by flooding have occurred frequently in different regions of Brazil, where urban areas grow fast with low Master Plan control and integrated use of flood risk maps. At the same time, Civil Defense have been challenged on strategies of how to convince the population to abandon their homes in an iminent flood disaster. In order to help and support these strategies, mainly to avoid occupations in susceptible areas that may be irregular or not, it was developed a mobile application named “Neocartografia". The main goal of the application is to show ordinary people the potential effect of flooding presented in real time and interacting with their own buildings. The idea of integrating the real image of the environment with the simulation of a certain depth of flooding, being set manually or related with hydrological and hydraulic modelling. The Civil Defense agents point the smartphone to the citizen’s home, through augmented reality and simulates in the real world the depth of the water according to some parameters (speed, depth and extent of the flood waves). The results earned with the first version of Neocartografia Application have been sufficiently good to reach the developers first goals, but still must be improved.