Assessing the Sense of Presence to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Wildfire Training

Virtual Reality is beneficial for high-risk training such as firefighting, extreme weather, and police due to cost and risk concerns. A fundamental characteristic of VR is creating the sense of being there and train participants to make the right decisions under high pressure. This research presents an experimental study that aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a Virtual Environment to train wildfire fighting by assessing the sense of presence. We have 10 participants who experienced the same Virtual Environment in two VR conditions represented by HTC Vive and Google Cardboard. The two devices represent two immersion levels. To evaluate the effectiveness, we used the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) for participants to rate the subjective opinions of spatial presence, the real-time recorded ECG signal to indicate the stress level during the experiment, and skin temperature to show the excitement level.