iTRA Virtual Reality Project – Use of Fire Extinguishers

April 2, 2019

Building upon the success of the VR Prestart Light Vehicle
Check which rolled out late last year, we have been working with one of our clients to enhance their Fire Extinguisher training by creating 3 Virtual Reality scenarios for their employees to experience.

While giving the trainees (virtual) hands on time with the extinguishers to better prepare them in the case of an emergency situation, our client also gains insight into their employees’ knowledge of which extinguishers to use and their effectiveness at extinguishing a fire. This data is collected throughout the 3 scenarios and sent back to TrainTrac for analysis. As an added bonus, the data is also presented to the trainee as a score which is added to a site wide leader board. This encourages competition between the employees and an incentive to do the training again to beat their co-workers score.

During the prototype stages of the project, we built a similar experience for the HoloLens, where a pallet fire would be placed in the real world using Augmented Reality and a trainee would use a virtual fire extinguisher to extinguish the fire. The benefits of this is that you can practice each scenario in the actual location that a real-world fire would occur. However, this approach does have added complexities and lacks the immersion that Virtual Reality provides. Ultimately our client ended up going for the Virtual Reality approach.