Designing an Immersive Wildfire Visualization System for Firefighters
Published in Extended Abstracts of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025
Global warming has been exacerbating extreme wildfires’ destructive nature and scale. As wildfire events become more common, firefighting agencies require training technologies to enhance the situational awareness necessary for effective decision-making during these extreme events. We have designed and developed a research prototype system called iFire. iFire is a full-body, immersive wildfire visualization system to support firefighters in gaining exposure to the latest developments in wildfire behavior. iFire realistically and immersively visualizes wildfire data, providing a tool to study wildfires as if the user is encapsulated in the event. We hope that by exposing firefighters to different extreme wildfire behaviors, they can understand how they behave in real life and gain situational awareness to improve their decision-making during these events.
Recommended citation: Carlos Alfredo Tirado Cortes, Mario Flores Gonzalez, Richard J. Hurley, and Dennis Del Favero. 2025. Designing an Immersive Wildfire Visualization System for Firefighters. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 183, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3719903
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