A SWOT Analysis of the Field of Virtual Reality for Firefighter Training

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) research has gone through rapid advances and the technology has established itself as a valuable training tool in many domains. While research in the field of emergency response, and more specifically in the field of firefighting, is still catching up, the future potential of VR technology for training is promising. This paper uses the SWOT framework to analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats immersive VR technology faces in the field of firefighter training. While using VR for training is cost-effective, safe to use and provides the ability to prepare trainees with a large variety of high fidelity training environments, the lack in specialization of the applications for the fire-service sector and issues with technology acceptance and limitations need to be addressed. Looking to current research, there are promising findings that might be directly transferable, creating affective, and multi-sensory experiences for more effective mental and physical training of firefighters in the future. More research is needed to establish methods of skills transfer from VR to real life scenarios and to evaluate the potential risk of frequent training in engaging and physiologically stimulating virtual environments.

Measuring User Experience, Usability and Interactivity of a Personalized Mobile Augmented Reality Training System

“…Although there has been a lot of research on the adoption of AR for training, few studies have concentrated on the context of firefighting training [ 27 , 28 , 29 ], which mostly examined VR-based training systems. This research details the user experience of augmented reality in firefighting training, and provides a deeper understanding of the behavioral purpose to use augmented reality in marine training.…”

The Potential of Virtual Reality for Police Training Under Stress

“…To direct an evidence-based integration of VR in police training and related research, a SWOT analysis was conducted to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats when applying VR in police training. While the SWOT framework was originally used as a tool to analyse market forces impacting the standing of companies, it has been utilized successfully in academia to analyse the application of emerging technologies in a specific field (e.g., Düking et al, 2018;Engelbrecht et al, 2019). A summary of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats can be found in Figure 1.…”

“…As such, it might be concluded that the most advanced, technologically immersive system possible should be designed to maximize user presence. Therefore, the immaturity of the technology and the resulting cybersickness are considered as weaknesses of VR training (Engelbrecht et al, 2019). Therefore, great developmental efforts have been put into improving frame-rate, tracking, field of view, refresh rate, latency, and resolution over the past years (Cummings and Bailenson, 2016).…”

Immersive Design Engineering

“…15 domain experts positively evaluated the system, despite low visual quality in this first prototype. A review of firefighting environments is provided by Engelbrecht et al [46].…”