Visualizing and experiencing harmful gases in the VR environment
Moohyun Cha, Byung-Il Choi · 2010
We present an approach to visualizing and experiencing the harmful gases caused by fire in the virtual reality environment. It is known that a large portion of the casualties that result from fires in an enclosed space are due to poisoning by noxious gases rather than serious burns. The virtual-reality based visualization of those harmful gases will help people to enhance first emergency response and increase human safety. Because it is not currently possible to simulate the propagation of harmful gases in real time, we numerically simulate the behavior of fire-driven gases using an appropriate CFD solver off-line, then visualize the resulting voxel data through direct volume rendering, enabling an intuitive experience of gases in a virtual 3D space. Also, to visualize this type of naturally invisible gas data, we designed a transfer function based on the safety or danger range of gases, which can be customized by fire engineers or training supervisors.