Fire Training Simulator

This is an educational project carried out as part of my 4th year at Sheridan College. The team worked closely with the associated project supervisors to implement a solution that will provide fire safety training using Microsoft HoloLens Mixed Reality technology.

The Problem

There is a large number of individuals who lack hands-on fire safety training. Some of the reasons that's causing this are,
- Lack of publicly open fire safety training sessions
- Fire safety training is a very costly process
- Current training uses large sums of single use material

The Solution

An augmented reality application that simulates the emergency fire situations and teaches the individual proper evacuation and extinguisher procedures in a safe and exciting way.

Role

My role in the project was to design and develop a Android application that acts as an controller for initiating training processes.

Identifying our users

Upon discussing with the team and associated supervisors, it was established that the system is going to be used by two different users. First user being the trainee, who part takes in acquiring fire safety training while the trainer (our second user) monitors and administrates the trainee's process during the entire training sessions.

Designing the infrastructure

Since we were implementing this system from the ground up, one of our major task was to design an infrastructure that would best structure the system and provide a seamless user experience.

Users 1: Trainer (Left)

The trainer is using the "Simulation Controller" i.e., the Android tablet to control the fire training simulation. They have the ability to set different attributes for the training simulation based on the trainee's fire safety knowledge.

Users 2: Trainee (Right)

The trainee on the other hand, will use three devices simulateously as they progress through the simulation. First or primary device, they will be using for the duration of the training will the Microsoft Hololens headset. Second, the fire extinguisher (a raspberry pi device, consist of a button which when triggered initiates the extinguisher foam animation on the hololens) which they will use to extinguish the fire. Lastly, the 911 call device (an Android phone app) which they will use almost towards the end of the simulation that is once all the safety procedures prior have been completed

Wireframes

Since I was responsible for the designing the trainer Android application. I started out by first designing wireframes and my thinking throughout the designing phrase was to make the trainer have easy access to all the high-level controls that is required for setting up a training sessions.

Design Solution

The solution, a split screen layout where the left of the dashboard consists of the trainee’s information which updates as the training progresses while the right panel contains all the controls. For other information such as trainer information, trainee's session information are display in dialog boxes as those information are viewed either at the beginning or ending of a session.

Final designs

As project moved forward, new features were added to the application and since we were a in time constraint the changes were directly implemented into the final designs.

Some of changes included of a session information dialog, changing the start/stop simulation button position and introducing a restart simulation button. Reshuffling the controls panel UI controls such as using radio buttons instead of regular buttons as its more clear and enforces the idea only one can be selected.

Also the fire level slider was removed and the difficulty slider component is replaced with radio buttons, this decision was made as a team since we felt that the difficulty and fire level values was redundant.

Development

The application was developed in Android studios and is written in Java. The application uses a variety of Android packages, most important being Socket.io which helps the application communciate with the system's server.

Meeting our goals

The team was successfully able to provide a fully working system within the given time constraints and were able to build a product that met our proposed goals.

Learnings

The technology used in the project was fairly new to the team and it presented a steep learning curve. Especially figuring out device connectivity issues as each device had their own constraints which had to be kept in mind when building out the system. But overall the project did help understand the process of manipulating hardware devices using different software technologies.

Awards 🏆

1st place Capstone project
IT Best Capstone Award for Potential World Impact