Cinemassively: Virtual Firefighter Training Center

by Moo Money on Mar 29th 2008 12:30PM

Real life, Video, Events, real-world, Events, in-game, Second Life, Free-to-play, Cinemassively, Machinima

It's getting late and the sun is starting to set when you hear the fire alarm. The fire truck stops in front of a burning building, and you start to canvas the area for survivors of the disaster, while the others are fighting the fire. A man is discovered and is led to safety. This probably happens every day in real life training to be a firefighter, but how often does it happen in a virtual world?

The MASA Group has prepared a Second Life area specifically for training the future heroes. An interesting tidbit to note is that, while we're not sure of the status of the firefighters themselves, the victim roles are all bots. Most departments have live fire drills, with about 99 firefighters killed between 1994 and 2004 from them. Which method do you think is more effective?

For a more comprehensive video of the action, stay tuned after the cut ...

Source

Tags: bots, cinemassively, demonstration, linden-lab, live-fire-drills, machinima, second-life, simulation, sl, virtual-firefighter-training-session, wargame-simulation

Reader Comments (3)

Firefighters are fully autonomous bots too. Only the incident commander is a trainee. Bots are powered by our artificial intelligence library, they react in real time to unexpected events, and respect doctrine (french doctrine, US doctrine coming by the end of the month)
Check our progresses here: http://www.bravenewbot.com

Training is fine.... but their method in SL is.... not a very ideal way to go... at all.

Few things they are truly missing out on real training aspect, compared to this and real life event.

1: Heat - You still need to be aware how hot the room is before you could move on across the room. You can't sense heat in SL. Using a hud would be just plain dumb.

2: Obstacle - that's number one thing for them, how to understand and cope with the places in a rush. More importantly, it's physical work... having either Havok 1 or 4 do it for your avatar isn't going to work. But what bothered me that the rooms in SL was empty... where are the stuff being gulfed in flame? Heck, I'm more surprised to see more buildings with cars and streets, around the burning place and the room inside is barren....

3: Gulfed building - SL can't simulate actual burning in real time event. Using particle is fine... but what's in gulfed is another problem. Such as floor giving away support or roof falling on you randomly given time.

4: Smoke - easy enough to use more particle but that's only make lag worst. However, my problem with this training place in SL is not realistic at all. In real life event, the whole room often would be filled in smoke, making it harder to see anything at all. Why am I not seeing that in SL?

5: Population - let's face it... there's always going to be a lot of people in fire event in some places like those business building. We all know SL can't have so many people, over 300 people, in one sim alone. Dealing with large group of people is a whole another new level to deal with. Some people are complete idiot, panicking, unreasonable, often heroic fool, sobbing in a hidden corner, passing out from smoke, burnt, and maybe dead.

I really think using SL is a bad idea if they (SWORD) really want to save a few bucks. Better off to build their own simulator. (or keep working on their current one?)

However... the difference between virtual and real life event is a vast difference between using your own body, limbs & back... and using keyboard & mouse to work.

Vastly I say! because at few times I had wished I could just press Ctrl Z to undo some things I do in real life.... that's how bad it is. Not that they could use undo in their virtual training... but best to keep them away from something they were truly trained for through their own physical functions than clicking on something that you thought you could.

"ahh fire is over there, better click on that.... uhh.. O_o"

Now only if we could get a working hologram... that would have been a better choice.

Nacon,
Don't get us wrong,
You are totally right, virtual training is not fit to rehearse basic operational tactics for firefighters, they need to confront reality. But our simulation is dedicated to Incident Commanders training. They have a higher level role, they monitor the overall situation, never enter the building and give operational orders to truck leaders (which dispatch them to lower level firefighters).
That's why the outside is more completely simulated than the inside. Simulating accurately fire and smoke effects would have no impact on the trainee perception of the disaster. We roughly simulate fire extinction inside because it helps simulate realistic durations of actions, and allow a better visualization during after action review.
This is our first video of our developments, we will increase realism outside, but not inside (at last for this kind of training).

The Second Life avatar limit issue is not so problematic for 99% of the most needed trainings. Special situations like high rise buildings or very crowded place may be simulated in the future with impostors or "prim based humans", we will certainly work on this soon.