Fire ISO AR

While working at APV (AP Ventures, LLC) in 2024, I was tasked with designing an application to prepare DoD firefighters for the Fire Incident Safety Officer position. With the DoD Incident Safety Officer handbook as a reference, I wrote a storyboard that outlined each quiz question and its corresponding animated sequence, and I developed it as an augmented reality application with Unity's ARFoundation/ARCore plugins.

In this app, the user assumes the role of a Fire Incident Safety officer and is presented with the realistic scenario of an aircraft that crashed into a residential building near a military base. To illustrate this scenario, an animation of an aircraft crashing into a building and particle effects, vehicle animations, and animated firefighters appear before the user on whatever surface they projected the AR object to. The user interacts with a 3D AI chatbot playing the role of a Fire Incident Commander who quizzes the player on the proper procedures and protocols. Each time that the player uses voicechat to answer the IC correctly, the scene would update with additional animations depicting the appropriate fire procedures.

Developing this application in Unity required an Artificial Intelligence agent to play the NPC (non-player-character) role of the Fire Incident Commander. I used Inworld.Ai to program a character to act as an authoritative mentor by tweaking personality parameters and by writing YAML scripts that explicitly triggered the AI to respond and question the user based on a multiple-choice quiz system. I then used Inworld.Ai's Unity SDK to apply the character API token to a 3D model of a firefighter (procured asset from marketplace).

For the animated sequences of the scenario, I used Unity's particle system to generate water, smoke, and fire effects each time that a structure of the building collapsed. I hand-keyed the vehicle animations (procured asset models of fire engines, emergency vehicles) and used Mixamo mocap data and Unity animation state machines for the animations of emergency services workers that appear on the scene. I also iteratively improved upon the UI menu buttons for controlling the scale and orientation of the tabletop 3D scene, as well as UI for toggling an optional background, or for quitting the app. In collaboration with a software engineer, we created a triggering system that would take dialog triggers from interactions with the Incident Commander character and use that to trigger different animated events.

Awards:

- 2026 Disruptive Tech Award, FORUM
- 2025 Innovation Champion Award from American Council for Technology - Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) at the Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference
-2025 FORUM Innovation Award

App stores:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apv.fireincidentar&hl=en_US
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fire-department-iso-ar/id6587815823