In collaboration withLoudoun County Fire & Rescue

The platform for the nextgeneration of firefightingperception

As seen on

Press coverage and firefighter engagement

The two students standing with a deputy chief and a battalion chief of Loudoun County Fire and Rescue, who is holding the green prototype helmet.
Loudoun County Fire & Rescue
The two students standing in front of the fenced-off remains of a burned townhouse in Loudoun County.
Where this started
The two students beside a fire chief in dress uniform on the Great Day Washington set.
WUSA9 · Great Day Washington
Wide view of the Great Day Washington studio during taping, with the prototype helmet on a table beside the host and the panel.
The interview
A student presenting the helmet to seated Loudoun County Fire and Rescue officers in a station briefing room.
Briefing LCFR command staff
The Great Day Washington host wearing the prototype helmet on set, with a student pointing at it.
On set · Great Day Washington
The helmet shell on a glass table beside a desktop 3D printer, with circuit boards and component boxes laid out around it.
The bench

From the department

Why this exists

It started with a house we used to live in.

A townhouse in Loudoun County that our family used to live in burned down. The fire was fatal, and it was set deliberately.

Inside a working structure fire, smoke takes vision away completely — crews search rooms by feel, and the people outside cannot see what the people inside are looking at. That gap is the whole reason this prototype exists.

Loudoun County, Virginia

Loudoun Now’s account ↗

What it sees

Three passes over the same room, at the same time.

A recording of the prototype running. One feed, three channels at once — no single one of them survives every condition on its own.

Prototype run · screen recording · no audio

  • Thermal view of a hallway and living room in magenta and orange, with yellow detection boxes labelled with class names and confidence scores.

    Object detection

    Heat, then a guess with a number on it

    Thermal separates bodies from cold structure; every box carries the confidence the model actually returned.

    82%Detection precision · prototype bench

  • The same hallway rendered as white outlines on black by the edge-detection pass, with a detection box still overlaid.

    Edge detection

    The room reduced to structure

    Walls and door frames survive; texture and colour do not. It still reads when the whole room is hot and thermal goes flat.

    34 msPer frame · on-helmet inference

  • A sparse 3D point cloud of the interior plotted on a grey grid with labelled axes.

    3D mapping

    Where you have already been

    Points accumulate into a rough volume of the space, so the route back out survives when the room in front of you does not.

    <0.8 mPositioning error · project target

Command view

The same picture, from outside the building.

One firefighter's perception is worth more when the team can see it. A commander opens an incident and gets all three channels live, the unit's position on the map, the roster, and a MAYDAY control on the same screen.

The command dashboard: a dark incident map with panels down the left for object detection, edge detection, and 3D mapping, a MAYDAY button at the top, and a units and personnel roster on the right.

Real session. The units, personnel, and incident on screen are demo data.

MAYDAY
Broadcasts last known position and sensor state to everyone on the incident.
Live channels
Object detection, edge detection, and 3D mapping stream to the same screen the firefighter is looking through.
Incident map
The structure and the unit's position on it, so command is tracking a place rather than a radio call.
Units and personnel
Assignments for the incident, with the active unit and the active firefighter held in view.
Elapsed
Time on air since the session opened — the number that governs air management.

The department

In partnership with Loudoun County Fire & Rescue.

We took the prototype into a station and walked Battalion Chief Jason Collins and Deputy Chief Josh Cooper through it. Those conversations are ongoing.

A student presenting the helmet to Loudoun County Fire and Rescue officers seated in a station briefing room.
Walking through the system with LCFR command staff