Interactive simulation of fire in virtual building environments

This paper describes the integration of the Berkeley Architectural Walkthrough Program with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s CFAST fire simulator. The integrated system creates a simulation based design environment for building fire safety systems; it also allows fire safety engineersto evaluate the performance of building designs, and helps make performance-based fire codes possible. We demonstrate that the visibility preprocessing and spatial decomposition used in the Walkthru also allow optimization of the data transfer between the simulator and visualizer. This optimization improves the ability to use available communication bandwidth to get needed simulation data to the Walkthru in the best order to visualize results in real time; an appropriate communication model and data structures are presented. General issues arising in the integration of environmental simulations and virtual worlds are discussed, as well as the specifics of the Walkthru-CFAST syst...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: Richard W. Bukowski, Carlo H. Séquin
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Data Structures, SIGGRAPH 1997, Simulation