Screen capture of a 3-D map of U.S. Bank Stadium and adjacent areas of downtown Minneapolis.
A three-dimensional mapping solution, with roots at St. Cloud State, is changing how cities and major venues manage incidents and deliver services.
GeoComm’s Smart City Map and Smart Venue Map debuted in July at X Games Minneapolis, an extreme-sports competition. They were the coordinating solutions in the 80-agency command center that served the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis. They are expected to do similar duty when the Final Four of the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament comes to Minneapolis in 2019.
Core concepts of Smart City Map and Smart Venue Map were conceived and tested at St. Cloud State by Guy Konietzko, a GeoComm consultant, and three St. Cloud State people: Mark Gill, visualization engineer, and students Alex Persian and Steve Henningsgard ’17.
Screen capture of a prototype 3-D map of campus, developed in 2014 at the ISELF Visualization Lab.
“We had a very, very successful X Games and very, very successful Super Bowl,” said Konietzko, who now serves GeoComm as market manager for joint operations, command and fusion centers.
GeoComm is a St. Cloud-based, national provider of geographic information and communication systems for 9-1-1 call centers. It is a St. Cloud State partner with University ties that date back to the company’s founding in 1995.
The hub of the Super Bowl command center was a large screen that integrated indoor and outdoor 3-D maps with multiple information streams, including sensors, dispatch systems, city cameras and U.S. Bank Stadium cameras.
- View a video about the command center that highlights 3-D mapping
Smart City Map and Smart Venue Map gave law enforcement and security personnel a shared sense of situational awareness. It reduced the amount of time required to identify a problem, get visual information and respond, said Konietzko.
Henningsgard is a GeoComm product manager. As an undergraduate student in 2014, he worked in the ISELF Visualization Lab with Gill and Persian to answer a question posed by GeoComm: “What does it take to do mapping in 3-D?”
UNLEASH INNOVATION
The first 3-D map was a browser-based representation of the St. Cloud State campus. It was linked to a mobile app — developed by Persian and Henningsgard — that simulated 9-1-1 phone calls. Those calls returned a GPS location of the phone user, for example Wick Science Building.
A second version integrated with the University’s WiFi system, which improved indoor location accuracy. In two weekends of testing in 2015, Public Safety and St. Cloud Police Department officers were able to locate callers in specific rooms, according to Gill.
That second version was developed in ArcGIS Pro, the flagship software of ESRI, the world’s leading mapping-technology company.
Fast-forward to 2017 and 2018 and the technologies perform as expected at two international events.
GeoComm is seeking partners to develop Smart City Map and Smart Venue Map, Henningsgard said.
Konietzko said GeoComm is working with NFL stadiums and “Tier 1 cities” identified by the Department of Homeland Security as high-risk areas.
The Visualization Lab, in Room 101 at ISELF, has ongoing partnerships with six organizations. This summer GeoComm is expected to hire five student workers for new projects at the Visualization Lab, Gill said.
This is a good reason to earn your GIS degree from SCSU. It helps for every business analysis I am making