Collaborative virtual environment to study aircraft evacuation for training and education

Numerous studies have explored the process of learning and its effectiveness in training and education. Collaborative virtual environment for studying aircraft evacuations in virtual reality environment can be used as an education and training tool. We believe that people learn best through real life experiences and that a sense of presence is developed in a virtual environment that can provide real world knowledge and experience. Our proposed multiuser environment consists of aircrafts, an airport, runways, and a control tower. Virtual reality experiments with virtual evacuation drills are necessary to study human behavior under panic or stressful situations that cannot be evaluated in the real world. The use of collaborative virtual environments to run virtual evacuation drills for an emergency evacuation eliminates risk of injury to participants and allows for the testing of scenarios that could not be tested in real life due to legal issues and possible health risks to participants. Our contribution lies in our approach to combine computer simulated agents and user controlled autonomous agents in a collaborative virtual environment to perform virtual evacuation drills. Results from this study can be used to measure the effectiveness of current procedures, protocols, and the effectiveness of training for airline and security personals.