Presentation title: Trucks with Lazers - Enhancing Human Driver Perception with Extended Reality and Real-Time Data
Abstract: Operating and navigating large vehicles through unpaved and unprepared environments is extremely challenging, posing potential dangers such as obstacles, limited visibility, and long rescue response times. Canada’s wilderness is extremely extensive, and will be undergoing substantial shifts due to climate change and other human disturbances. Simultaneously, there is a strong demand from diverse sectors to gain greater access to and produce data products of Canada’s wilderness. There has been continued development to improve the capabilities of off-road vehicles, but limited efforts towards novel ways to support the drivers themselves. Currently, real-time data collection capabilities and the emerging Extended Reality (XR) interfaces are rapidly maturing and becoming more accessible. This presents a unique opportunity to explore the intersection between 3D data collection and extended reality design in complex wilderness environments. No one has yet demonstrated the use of XR to support analytical visualization of LiDAR sensor data in civilian off-road vehicles, especially with the aim of enhancing the driver’s situational awareness. In this talk, I will provide an overview and progress report of my thesis project to investigate how combining LiDAR technology with the emerging XR interface technologies could deliver new capabilities in real-time spatial visualization and augmented human perception in challenging geographic environments.

Presentation title: Mapping Canadian Community Initiatives Addressing Transport Poverty: what I learned as a new ArcGIS Online User
Abstract: My presentation will describe my reflections and process of creating a web map in ArcGIS Online as part of a project with Mobilizing Justice. It will provide an overview of the Mobilizing Justice partnership and how the map supports efforts to advance transport equity in Canada. The second part of my presentation will showcase the different ArcGIS Online features that I used to create the map. I will also discuss the roadmaps/challenges that I encountered along the way. I will conclude with my learnings and reflections as someone new to GIS. The purpose of the presentation is to share my experiences, encourage people interested in learning GIS, and to highlight the important work that Mobilizing Justice is doing and how this map supports it.

Presentation title: Exploring Equitable Bike Share: Mapping Vancouver Bike Share Access Across Neighbourhoods
Abstract: In 2016, the City of Vancouver launched its public bike share system, Mobi by Shaw Go (Mobi), to provide people with a convenient, flexible, and affordable mode of transportation for their daily trips. Bike share docking stations were initially installed in and around the downtown core to reach the largest number of people.
Between 2017 and 2022, Mobi implemented numerous changes to reduce barriers to bike share. One of these changes included the geographical expansion of its service area to reach a more diverse range of neighbourhoods. In partnership with the City of Vancouver, we conducted a socio-spatial analysis of the service area expansion to determine whether the new stations added resulted in a more equitable distribution of bike share access across the city’s neighbourhoods.
In this presentation, we will share how we mapped Mobi’s expanded service area using two equity indicators to gain a better understanding of where access has improved in the city and which gaps to more equitable bike share still exist. Our findings suggest that while the service area expansion has helped to reduce the gaps in bike share access for equity-deserving populations in Vancouver, inequities still exist . We will briefly explain how our socio-spatial analysis findings have informed our project’s next steps.