Enhancing Fire Safety Education Through Immersive Virtual Reality Training with Serious Gaming and Haptic Feedback

Abstract

Over the past decades, China has faced an increasingly severe fire issue, resulting in significant human and financial losses. Consequently, the importance of enhancing fire safety education for citizens has become more pronounced. However, due to safety risks in actual fire scenes, the practical use of firefighting equipment was often learned passively through text or video resources, posing challenges in ensuring users can proficiently operate actual equipment. Virtual reality (VR) emerged as a promising technology to provide users with a low-risk environment to gain hands-on experience with firefighting equipment. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a specially designed VR game-based firefighting extinguishing equipment training (FEET) that integrated VR with serious gaming elements. The study evaluated the effectiveness of FEET through a comparison between high (HI) and low (LI) immersiveness VR and a non-immersive (NI) setting as a baseline. The study incorporated haptic feedback mechanisms, such as audio and vibration, to enhance user immersiveness within the HI setting. The focus of the study was on evaluating knowledge acquisition, user experiences, and interaction preferences for the proposed FEET design. The study adopted three distinct learning sequences to mitigate the VR halo effects. The results of the study indicated that both VR-based learning methods yielded outstanding user experiences that significantly surpassed the NI setting. Furthermore, the study showed that haptic feedback with richer game contents further enhanced user experiences, underscoring the importance of simulating realistic sensing in improving learning outcomes.

Keywords:

• Fire safety training
• virtual reality
• serious games
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Ningbo Science and Technology Bureau (S&T) Bureau through the Major S&T Program under [Grant 2021Z037], in part by the UNNC Education Foundation through Li Dak Sum Innovation Fellowship under [Grant LDS202307], and in part by a T&L Conference Grant from the UNNC Faculty of Science and Engineering.

Notes on contributors

Linjing Sun

Linjing Sun is a Ph.D. candidate with the HCI Laboratory of University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Her research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Intelligent Reality, Gamified Education, Social Interaction and Human-Centered AI.

Boon Giin Lee

Boon Giin Lee is an Associate Professor at School of Computer Science and Head of HCI Laboratory of University of Nottingham Ningbo China, China. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Intelligent Reality, Wearable Sensing, Internet-of-Things, UX Design and Human-Centered AI.

Wan-Young Chung

Wan-Young Chung is Full Professor at Department of Electronic Engineering, Pukyong National University, Republic of Korea. His research interests include Wearable Biomedical Sensing System, Human-Computer Interaction, Micro-Sensor-Based Internet-of-Things and AI-Powered Sensor Signal Processing.