VR/AR/MR BASED 3D IMMERSIVE TRAINING SYSTEM FOR BUILDING LIFE SAFETY INSPECTIONS

Various governmental agency inspections take place during the course of the construction process of a project. These inspections are conducted for project quality control, occupant and worker safety, public health and welfare,... [ view full abstract ]

Various governmental agency inspections take place during the course of the construction process of a project. These inspections are conducted for project quality control, occupant and worker safety, public health and welfare, and so on. Building fire inspectors' involvement with a project starts with construction documents review for code compliance during the design and permitting phase and progresses to the inspections before and during the construction for job-site safety and final inspections of the building life safety improvements prior to issuing an certificate of occupancy. Traditionally, training of building fire inspectors require the use of mock-up facilities which can be costly to build, maintain and update. Often the scope and functionality of such mock-up facilities are limited in terms of building construction types and environment. Various mock-up facilities and construction systems although highly desirable in fire science curriculum are not readily attainable due to cost and space constraint factors. Recent advancements in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies have opened up a new realm of possibilities of virtual training systems to solve this problem. This paper presents a virtual training system based on Microsoft HoloLens® and SketchUp Viewer® program that has been developed to train fire inspectors to recognize code violations during the virtual walk-through process of a 3D building model. Various code violation identification tasks were tested by a group of faculty and students from a fire science program and results are discussed. User subjective evaluations of the system are summarized as well.