vFireVI: 3D Virtual Interface for vFire

Abstract

Wildfires cause severe amounts of damage to wildlife habitats and property. The most successful way of escaping safely or quelling a fire is to do so with communication, and as a group. While there are several other wildfire simulators, visualization and multi-user components are lacking or non-existent in most of them. vFireVI aims to provide a safe and accurate virtual environment for simulation and interaction with wildfires through multi-user collaboration, accurate terrain, and realistic fire spread. In order to do this, an interface was built between vFireVI and an earlier project, vFireLib, to allow transmission of simulation data back and forth. Combining these two allows for an intuitive user interface, responsive multiplayer, quick server communication, and rapid simulations. All of this is done in virtual reality to provide a meaningful and immersive experience, where users can collaborate and test each other.