Using collaborative virtual geographic environment for fire disaster simulation and virtual fire training

Abstract

A fire disaster has the highest occurrence of frequency among disasters. A fire presents some of the characteristics of a disaster because of the highly destructive action of fire and of the considerable number of victims. Fire rescue is very essential in fire disaster emergency response. Disaster planning and response require ever more scientific elaboration and technological support. The paper establishes applications of fire disaster simulation and virtual fire training by using our Collaborative Virtual Geographic Environment (CVGE) platform-CySim, which is developed based on open source OpenSimulator server and Second Life client. The approach links fire simulation and human behaviour rehearsal to virtual environment, thus provides a flexibility interaction platform and distributed and collaborative learning network for disaster knowledge learning and virtual training. Users (trainers) can play it again and again, until they get it right. It therefore can be a replacement of live simulation training of fire disaster.