Isaiah Snow and Kellan Blake
Bachelor of Science Capstone Project, August 2020

Read about this project  on UWB website.

[Link to Capstone Presentation]

Fire departments need to train firefighters to use pump panels. To do so the department needs to schedule a time for an entire rig, water, and a place to burn. A virtual reality (VR) trainer would remove these requirements and allow a single firefighter to train in their down time. A trainer like this would require all interactions and logic to be modeled in a way that exactly replicates the real pump panel.The solution to create this trainer, was to start with creating every interaction on the pump panel for use in VR to make up the pump panel. This would be tested on firefighters to make sure that they can use it. During this test we learned that audio had a key role in pump operations. An audio solution for the engine was developed alongside with the simulator logic and then tested on the firefighters again to make sure it was exact. The last thing to be developed is the scenarios that pump operators can customize to fit scenarios they find themselves in. We are in progress of doing the last user for the user scenarios.