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

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.