On Nov. 9, the launching ceremony of Shanghai “119” Firefighting Publicity month of 2021, which was also the first Fire Protection Cultural Innovation Exhibition, were held in Shanghai nature museum. The theme of the event is “Taking the responsibility of fire protection, avoiding the risks for safety”, aiming to expand the effect of publicity and education through a series of activities, further improve the awareness of fire safety in all citizens, actively build a social governance model for fire control characterized by collaboration, participation, and common interests of people, so that a fire-proof came in to being environment for the city's economic and social development and all citizens live and work in peace and with satisfaction.
Invited by the fire rescue team of Yangpu District, the Public Safety System Laboratory of the Department of Systems Science took to the exhibition the system “VR-based evacuation platform in emergencies” and relevant hardware. “VR-based evacuation platform in emergencies” is a virtual experimental platform independently developed by the team of Prof. FANG Zhiming of the Department of Systems Science. The platform can simulate an actual emergency based on Shanxi South Road metro station, and can edit the site of fire and smoke, evacuation instructions, the position and action of safety officers, train operation and termination, etc, to design a multi-dimensional d and realistic fire evacuation scenarios in subway. The platform is conducive to participants to learn fire safety knowledge and improve their responses in emergency evacuation and rescue while experiencing the simulated scenarios.
Many citizens came to the booth of the department and tried the platform. With the guidance and help from the students in charge, the participants experienced the subway scenes of fire escape with and without various evacuation instructions respectively. The experimental data such as movement trace and evacuation time in the virtual reality scene can be used to quantitatively study the crowd behavior in the evacuation scene.
The virtual experimental device can simulate the close-to-reality emergency evacuation scene. It is an economical yet effective form of fire safety publicity. It demonstrated the advantages in this exhibition, not only providing the public with a novel and effective way to obtain fire safety knowledge, but also further complementing the basic scientific research data in emergency rescue and escape. The well implemented activity will promote the continuous development, improvement and application of “VR-based evacuation platform” by the public safety system laboratory.
Translator: ZHEN Yu
Reviewer: ZHOU Huijun
