Durham University researchers have revealed that commercial games such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2 can be effective in training people in fire evacuation procedures. The underlying code of these games can be used to create virtual worlds complete with real buildings, offices and factories, which can help users practice evacuation methods for emergencies. The findings were published in the Fire Safety Journal. All staff and management must be fully aware of and comply with health and safety regulations as laid down by law. Find out about the range of iosh courses available from the experts at Workplace Law Training.

This is a new way to train people in the application of fire safety procedures and evacuation methodology to save lives in actual crises. A computer scientist from the Durham University was able to create 3D models of buildings and program three fire evacuation procedures inclusive of smoke and fire effects in three weeks. The model not only helped recognise layout problems of the buildings but also helped users understand evacuation procedures and trained them in the same. This is being seen as a considerably easier and cheaper way to prepare people for fire evacuation, compared to traditional ways of using virtual toolkits or writing fresh code.

Dr. Shamus Smith, the lead author, commented that virtual environment toolkits supply a mere fraction of the tools actually required to build virtual worlds. For example, it is not easy to create fire and smoke environments as these additional features require extensive programming skills and time from the developer. These features can, however, be easily replicated from the existing computer games where they have already been programmed. Such features play a key role in giving a real world feel to the situation when instructing people about fire evacuation processes.