Virtual reality display lets fire crews see in a blaze

When firefighters enter a burning building, they usually go in blind. Smoke often shrouds their view and it can be hard to know exactly where they are, or where the fire is.

A virtual reality project called ProFiTex at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria is attempting to change that by giving firefighters a head-up display which helps them navigate in the dark.

The system uses head-mounted infrared sensors that overlay surface temperatures onto the display, which also shows a 3D model of the surroundings created by a head-mounted depth camera. This gives firefighters an idea of how hot their surroundings are, whether it is safe to enter a room and the layout of the rooms in front of them.

"We basically reproduce the real environment virtually," explains project lead Hannes Kaufmann . "It can be invisible for the firefighter, so we give him a model which is visible, and we enhance it with thermal data. If a room wall is dark red from the outside, then it's dangerous inside."

All the data gathered is piped back to the fire crew outside, who can survey the whole scene and make decisions based on accurate real-time information. The fire truck receives the data via a fibre optic cable woven into the rope that fire crews often use to mark their way out of a dangerous structure.

Kauffman presented a paper on the project at the Augmented Human conference in Stuttgart, Germany, in March. He now wants to improve the system by using high-power infrared lasers. Lasers will pierce through even the thickest smoke, something the infrared cameras cannot do, and so could create a better 3D model for the firefighters' display. But he warns that more research is needed to find out how much information overlaid on their field of vision firefighters can cope with.

Victor Mateevitsi of the University of Illinois in Chicago says that although the project is interesting, there are still hurdles to overcome. "While the logic of the system can be miniaturised easily, the current generation of depth and infrared cameras are still big and clunky," he says. "Furthermore the use of a head-mounted display reduces the firefighter's field of view." He says that smart lenses ? contact lenses with a head-up display built in ? can be used instead once the technology matures.

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