Fire training and evaluation through the scientific visualization of fire phenomena

Virtual reality based fire training enables the provision of emergency response training through a computer-created fire environment. Because the accuracy of fire behavior can play a very important role in the training and evaluation process, we can utilize a specialized numeric solver to generate fire dynamics data, and apply scientific visualization techniques to effectively display these data in 3D. With the exception of volume rendering, typical scientific visualization methods pose an obstacle for people to understand and experience fire behavior in an intuitive manner in the virtual reality environment. We present an approach that enables the use of scientific visualization for fire training and evaluation through the real-time volume rendering of various physical quantities in fire dynamics. We found that this enabled users to easily grasp the useful information of a fire, as well as to evaluate safety achievement during training activities.