The evaluation of virtual environment training for a building clearing task

Abstract

This paper combines data from two experiments that evaluated the effectiveness of different virtual environments (VEs) for training the task of building clearing. 112 subjects were divided into 28 teams across two experiments. Each study consisted of 3 phases: lecture, team training, and testing in a real-world shoothouse. There were 6 training conditions: pc-based VE, helmet mounted display-based VE, real-world shoothouse, game console, single room real-world, and game console + single room real-world. The real-world shoothouse condition was the “gold-standard” against which test performances in other conditions were compared. An ANOVA was performed to compare test performance. There was a marginally significant main effect of performance across conditions, F(5, 22)=2.26, p<.07, ń_p ²=0.34. The game console/single room real-world condition performed similarly to the “gold standard” and better than the next highest performing condition. These data provide some evidence that VE training could be utilized to augment real-world training rather than supplant it.