At NIST’s National Fire Research Laboratory (NFRL), scientists and engineers develop ways to capture images of fire and its effects to help designers, engineers and emergency responders find the best ways to protect people, buildings and other infrastructure.
Fire researchers have long used still photography to record conditions before and after an experiment, but they were limited to two dimensions. In the last few years, high-resolution, spherical cameras with multiple lenses have been getting smaller, better and cheaper, making the NIST imaging effort possible.
“In experimental fire research, some of the most compelling data you can get is the visual data from video and photography,” says Matt Hoehler, a research structural engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “So we’re always trying to get closer to the fire.”
With a prototype camera system developed by Hoehler and his colleagues at NFRL, he has succeeded not just in getting close to a fire, but inside it. So far, the system has captured mesmerizing 360-degree video from a burning room, a mock-up of a museum collection storage room, a kitchen fire and, most recently, a forest fire. The footage allows a viewer to immerse themselves in the scene and shift their gaze in any direction to look at different aspects of the fire.
Complete NIST article is here.
