Natural and man-made disasters present the need to efficiently and effectively evacuate the people occupying the affected buildings. Providing appropriate evacuation instructions to the occupants of the building is a crucial aspect for the success of the evacuation. This paper presents an approach for giving evacuation instructions on mobile devices based on interactive location-aware 3D models of the building. User's position into the building is determined by using active short-range RFID technology. A preliminary user evaluation of the system has been carried out in the building of our Department.

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Interactive visualization of large 3D architectural models on mobile devices such as PDAs would significantly benefit applications such as indoor navigators and mobile tourist guides, on-site monitoring and annotation of architectural designs at construction sites, evacuation training and evacuation guidance. Although PDAs are becoming more powerful and a few are even equipped with 3D hardware accelerators, their performance does not yet allow to handle a large architectural model at an acceptable frame rate. To face this problem, we propose and experiment a system that exploits hierarchical view frustum culling and portal culling for interactively visualizing 3D architectural models on mobile devices. We also discuss the performance of the system and its integration with our mobile X3D player (MobiX3D). The performance of the system has been evaluated on a large three-floor building with 39 rooms, 42 stairs and 42 doors.