Advancing safety and efficiency training goals: The development of a virtual reality rescue training system for forest fires

Abstract

Forest fires, due to their multitude of influencing factors, complex disaster scene environment, and the randomness of special fire behaviors, pose issues in emergency rescue training, such as insufficient realism in disaster scenarios, significant safety hazards, and difficulties in behavior quantification and monitoring. This study applies virtual reality (VR) technology to develop a forest fire rescue training system, establishing three main modules: disaster situation deduction, rescue training, and teaching assessment. The system implements dynamic deduction of typical types of forest fires, effectively improving the simulation level of training scenarios. It constructs a fire scene, weather system, combustible material library, tool and equipment library, and action rule library, realizing dynamic interaction between real-time behavior and fire disaster situation under virtual scenarios based on the operating procedure. The system also structures a behavior monitoring and assessment process, achieving quantitative detection and post-evaluation of rescue training effects. To evaluate the system’s efficacy, pretesting and post-testing controlled experiments were conducted to verify the learning outcomes of trainees. The experimental results show that after undergoing 5 days of VR training, with daily sessions lasting 30 minutes, significant improvements were observed in the trainees’ cognition concerning forest fire rescue theory, operational skills, and firefighting strategies, as determined by repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). These improvements were statistically significant, promoting knowledge acquisition and transfer more effectively than traditional training methods (p < 0.05*). In addition, according to the subjective feedback results of the trainees, 84.2% of the participants were satisfied with the overall results of the training using this system. Despite some limitations that restrict the generalizability of the experimental conclusions, this study offers a new perspective on forest fire rescue training. Moreover, it provides valuable insights and references for the development of various emergency rescue training programs and the modernization of China’s firefighting and rescue forces.