Multisensory Virtual Environment for Fire Evacuation Training

Growing organizational safety awareness is propelling the interest in development of novel solutions for fire training. Significant effort in this area has previously gone into designing various immersive virtual reality (VR) systems in hopes of enabling trainees to safely explore and experience the consequences of their actions in scenarios that would be too hazardous in the real life. Yet, the fact that VR generally lacks the sensory feedback of a real life fire situation has been found to impede a sense of realism and validity of such experiences. As part of our efforts to mitigate this issue, we now present a new prototype fire evacuation simulator designed to deliver not just audiovisual feedback, but likewise real-time heat and scent stimulation. By engaging prospective users through such a hands-on experience, we hope to inspire and provoke other researchers into exploring the potential offered by novel technology in improving fire safety training methods.