Rapid prototyping a virtual fire drill environment using computer game technology

Abstract

Conducting fire evacuation drills in modern buildings under realistic fire conditions can be difficult. Typical fire drills do not feature dynamic events such as smoke filled corridors, fires in unexpected places or blocked fire exits that require on the spot decisions from evacuees. One alternative is the use of virtual environments. Virtual environments can support the training and observation of fire evacuee behaviours in 3D virtual buildings. However complex virtual environments can be difficult to build. This paper explores how the reuse of computer game technology can aid in the rapid prototyping of virtual environments which can be populated with fire drill evacuation scenarios. Over a three week period, a single developer constructed a realistic model of a real world building to support virtual fire drill evaluations. While participants in a user study found the simulated environment realistic, performance metrics indicated clustering in the results based on participants’ previous gaming experience.

Introduction

Conducting fire evacuation drills in modern buildings under realistic fire conditions can be difficult [1]. During fire drills, building occupants typically exit at a leisurely pace, without having to deal with panic inducing events such as smoke filled corridors, fires in unexpected places or blocked fire exits. Ko et al. [2] observe that there “is always an uncertainty regarding the exact situation evacuees would find themselves in an emergency evacuation”. In addition, fire evacuation drills are either considerably disruptive when they occur unannounced or tediously uneventful if routinely practiced [3]. There has been considerable work done on modelling human behaviour in response to fire events (for recent examples see [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]) but detailed evacuation behaviour of individual building occupants can be somewhat unpredictable [3], [10].

One alternative is the use of virtual environments to simulate fire evacuation scenarios. However building realistic virtual environments is a complex, expensive and time consuming process [11], [12], [13]. In addition to generating virtual object models [14], for example buildings and scenery, a developer must also manage support for user interaction [15], any dynamic or world behaviours that are required, for example collision detection, and any non-visual features of the virtual world, for example audio cues [16]. Although virtual environment development toolkits are available, many only provide a subset of the tools needed to build complete virtual worlds [17]. Some features of virtual worlds such as wind, fire, smoke and water, and the provision for embodied autonomous agents [18], are particularly hard to simulate. In addition, virtual environment toolkits often require additional programming skills and a substantial time investment on the part of the developer.

In recent years, work in the video game and virtual reality industries has been overlapping [19], [20]. The current generation of computer games present realistic virtual worlds featuring user-friendly interaction and the simulation of real world phenomena, for example gravity. Using computer games as the basis for virtual environment development has a number of advantages. Computer games are robust and extensively tested [21], both for usability and performance, work on off-the-shelf systems [12] and can be easily disseminated, for example via online communities. Many computer game developers support modification of their game environments by releasing level editors, i.e. to modify the game environment, and tools to edit the game behaviour. This allows the reuse of the underlying game engine technology, including 3D rendering, 2D drawing, sound, user input and world physics/dynamics [22]. These advanced features allow game engines to create realistic simulations and the modular nature of game engines means they are general enough to be adapted for different games or applications, which allow them to be reused [22].

This paper describes the use of commercial off-the-shelf computer game development tools to rapidly develop a virtual environment to test fire drill behaviours in a 3D virtual model of a real world building. We explored how reusing computer game technology can simplify the modelling of virtual buildings, the generation of effects such as fire and smoke—which are typically difficult to program—and the inclusion of realistic audio cues, such as fire alarms. A user study was conducted in three fire drill scenarios to evaluate the usability and realism of the developed virtual environment.

The remainder of this paper is as follows. Section 2 describes related work and Section 3 defines a number of computer game technologies that were considered. Section 4 describes the development of the virtual fire drill environment and Section 5 outlines the evaluation study. The results of the evaluation study are described in Section 6, followed by a discussion in Section 7. Conclusions and future work are presented in Section 8.