Use of Virtual Reality for Emergency Service Training

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in an emergency service and civil protection context.We present an exploratory user study with 30 participants sourced from the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) who were tasked with completing VR training on the assembly of a rescue platform.We evaluated the time to completion, mistakes made, cognitive load, usability, motivation, and perceived helpfulness of visual guidance elements implemented in the VR environment. The results indicate a positive effect of VR training. In addition to sourcing from a pool of emergency service workers as participants for our study, we report on the participants' feedback concerning other potential application areas for VR training in an emergency service context, which further sets our contribution apart from previous work. The paper contributes to the field of human-computer interaction by providing insights into the complex relationship between VR training and emergency service personnel.