Playing with fire: How VR is being used to train the next generation of firefighters

It might look like I've just entered a Ghostbusters costume contest, but what you see is actually the cutting edge of virtual reality (VR) firefighter training.

VR technology has been with us for years, but is still a relatively niche pursuit, primarily occupied by gamers using the best VR headsets for immersive gaming.

But there are tons of exciting applications for the technology emerging in professional environments. HTC, one of the big names in VR, invited Live Science to the idyllic English town of Moreton-in-Marsh — home of the Fire Service College — to learn how VR is training our next generation of firefighters.

Before we actually saw any training programs, we were shown around the world-class incident training ground by Paul Speight, incident command instructor at the college. We toured the various buildings they use to practice fire rescue scenarios, including the UK’s shortest motorway and a mock section of an offshore oil rig, which Speight was more than happy to ignite for our amazement.

I’ve stood beside large, roaring fires before — in the U.K. we have annual bonfires on Guy Fawkes night (Nov. 5) — but I was not prepared for the heat coming from this blaze. The faux rig fire used gas, rather than oil, to reduce pollution and Speight said it was easily several thousand degrees celsius (for reference, natural gas burns at 3,560 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,960 degrees Celsius), which was toasty even at the 40-foot (12 meters) distance we started from, and about as hot as I could bear when we moved up onto the rig itself.

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That raised an interesting issue with "virtual firefighting" — you can animate the fire in a virtual environment and slap a fake hose in someone’s hand, but how do you replicate the physical sensations? The heat? The smoke? The stress? I'd get my answer soon enough, but only after some virtual sleuthing.

RiVR investigate

The first of the two training programs we sampled was RiVR Investigate. I donned the VR headset — a HTC Vive Pro 2 — and was transported into the burnt out remains of a small suburban kitchen.

The first thing that struck me was how realistic the environment was. VR games typically avoid photorealistic graphics because it’s taxing on the hardware, and VR experiences need to run at smooth, high frame rates to stave off VR motion sickness. But thanks to the limited size of the map, and no need for moving characters or particle effects, RiVR Investigate generated realistic environments with incredible accuracy.

Looking up, I could see a set of tools hovering above me: a torch, camera, dictaphone, and even a scene light that could be orientated and left to hover in mid-air to illuminate the scene. I simply had to reach up and "grab" these gadgets using the VIVE controllers in my hands — it’s all very intuitive.

Poking around the aftermath of a kitchen fire, I was eventually drawn to a conspicuous black stain on the wall behind the stovetop, and a frying pan containing the world’s most well-done sausages — a likely cause of the blaze. With my hypothesis in hand, I watched a video recording of the actual fire, confirming that the blaze indeed started at the cooker. Skipping through timestamps on the clip, it was fascinating to see how the flames spread across the room. Beyond that, being able to just immediately check your homework and see the fire's progression at the click of a button provided instant training feedback.

Traditionally, the fire service sets up these fake burns in cargo containers — we even saw one on our tour. Alex Harvey, one of the co-founders of RiVR, explained that each of these burns costs about £5,000 (roughly $6400) and they’re basically one-use only — once someone starts rummaging around and disturbs the scene, it can’t really be used again. That’s the main advantage of a digital training program. You can run it again and again and again.

There are also the obvious health concerns of real fires, like smoke inhalation and the risk of injury in fire-damaged rooms from falling debris. Firefighters accept that their career path will lead them into dangerous environments, but reducing unnecessary exposure is a no-brainer, and these digital training tools do just that.

FLAIM Trainer

With the mystery solved and my ego swelling, it was time to turn up the heat with the second training program, FLAIM Trainer. While the investigation demo only required a headset, this time I was loaded up with some hefty gear including a heat vest, faux oxygen tank, and a hose VR controller.

Finally, it was time to fight fire. The screen faded in to reveal an airfield, with a 747-sized airplane ahead of me, engine ablaze. I pointed the hose at my target, pulled the admittedly very satisfying valve handle, and got to work. After dispatching that blaze, I tackled a garage fire in a suburban home which was a little trickier to manage, as the fire had spread throughout the room. According to FLAIM, fires spread and react to your efforts to extinguish them realistically thanks to their "proprietary algorithmic model."

For the most part, the controls felt very similar to VR games I had played before, only instead of blasting aliens or zombies, I was "shooting" a fire with water. I could move small distances physically, and I used a teleport to jump over large gaps (a clever solution to the limited play area). I found I never noticed the heat vest during the session — which was a bit of a letdown.

But the party piece of this training experience was the hose controller itself. The handle is actually attached to a length of hose on a motorized spool, which starts to winch back in to simulate the experience of wrangling a real fire hose. Not being a firefighter, I can’t attest to how realistically it replicated the real thing, but it was a significant effort to fight off the winch’s pull. I suspect the point is to replicate the general feeling of physical exertion — and on that front, it succeeded.

I came away from FLAIM Trainer initially disappointed, but that’s on me. As a VR gamer, I had expected a next-generation immersive gaming experience, but this isn’t a game designed to give me the power fantasy of being a firefighter; it’s a training tool to safely educate the next generation of life-savers and, on this front, VR seems to be in the ascendency.

Nobody is under the illusion that VR training will replace the real thing. It can't yet replicate the heat, the smoke, or the stress of a real fire. But what it can do is help prospective firefighters learn the procedures they will need to follow in a real incident. Both programs I experienced have racked up impressive client lists already; alongside numerous fire services around the globe, FLAIM also works with NASA and the U.S. Air Force, while RiVR works with the Department of Defense (DoD). Chatting with Speight whilst on our tour, he said that he considers introducing VR training tools to be his "legacy" in the fire service, and from what I saw, it’s one that he can be proud of.