A Virtual Ship Evacuation Serious Game: Assessment of Data and Passenger Training

Abstract

A considerable loss of life at sea is attributed to maritime accidents in passenger ships. Crew and passenger training with evacuation drills is a challenging and costly process while the complexity and size of ships affect negatively the outcomes in most evacuations. A proposed solution is the development of an evacuation serious game simulator, to improve the repeatability and realism of evacuation drills. To this end, a novel prototype multiplayer serious game was developed. The Ship Evacuation Simulator (SES) allows the simultaneous participation of computer-controlled bots and human-controlled avatars in ship evacuation scenarios. In this paper, numerous sets of scenarios were conducted, with and without the participation of human users, in order to assess SES in terms of training level, evacuation time, survival rate and user immersion. The evaluation process incorporated elements such as fire, smoke, day/night rotation, etc. This paper presents the SES game and then discusses the outcomes of the evacuation sessions. Future research aims to assess the influence of virtual reality technology with SES, in order to achieve higher immersion levels.