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1. Active shooter response training environment for a building evacuation in a collaborative virtual environment

   https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2020.13.ERVR-223  

   Sharma, Sharad ; Bodempudi, Sri Teja ; Scribner, David ; Grazaitis, Peter ( July 2020 , Electronic Imaging)

   During active shooter events or emergencies, the ability of security personnel to respond appropriately to the situation is driven by pre-existing knowledge and skills, but also depends upon their state of mind and familiarity with similar scenarios. Human behavior becomes unpredictable when it comes to making a decision in emergency situations. The cost and risk of determining these human behavior characteristics in emergency situations is very high. This paper presents an immersive collaborative virtual reality (VR) environment for performing virtual building evacuation drills and active shooter training scenarios using Oculus Rift head mounted displays. The collaborative immersive environment is implemented in Unity 3D and is based on run, hide, and fight mode for emergency response. The immersive collaborative VR environment also offers a unique method for training in emergencies for campus safety. The participant can enter the collaborative VR environment setup on the cloud and participate in the active shooter response training environment, which leads to considerable cost advantages over large-scale real-life exercises. A presence questionnaire in the user study was used to evaluate the effectiveness of our immersive training module. The results show that a majority of users agreed that their sense of presence was increased when using themore »immersive emergency« less
2. Improving Emergency Response Training and Decision Making Using a Collaborative Virtual Reality Environment for Building Evacuation

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59990-4_17  

   Sharma, Sharad ( October 2020 , Proceedings of 22nd HCI International Conference, HCII 2020, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 19–24, 2020)

   Emergency response training is needed to remember and implement emergency operation plans (EOP) and procedures over long periods until an emergency occurs. There is also a need to develop an effective mechanism of teamwork under emergency conditions such as bomb blasts and active shooter events inside a building. One way to address these needs is to create a collaborative training module to study these emergencies and perform virtual evacuation drills. This paper presents a collaborative virtual reality (VR) environment for performing emergency response training for fire and smoke as well as for active shooter training scenarios. The collaborative environment is implemented in Unity 3D and is based on run, hide, and fight mode of emergency response. Our proposed collaborative virtual environment (CVE) is set up on the cloud and the participants can enter the VR environment as a policeman or as a civilian. We have used game creation as a metaphor for developing a CVE platform for conducting training exercises for different what-if scenarios in a safe and cost-effective manner. The novelty of our work lies in modeling behaviors of two kinds of agents in the environment: user-controlled agents and computer-controlled agents. The computer controlled agents are defined with preexistingmore »rules of behaviors whereas the user controlled agents are autonomous agents that provide controls to the user to navigate in the CVE at their own pace. Our contribution lies in our approach to combine these two approaches of behavior to perform emergency response training for building evacuation.« less
3. Multi-agent Crowd Simulation in an Active Shooter Environment

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06015-1_8  

   Sharma, S. ( May 2022 , Lecture notes in computer science)

   Chen, J.Y.C. (Ed.)

   In recent years there has been a sharp increase in active shooter events, but there has been no introduction of new technology or tactics capable of increasing preparedness and training for active shooter events. This has raised a major concern about the lack of tools that would allow robust predictions of realistic human movements and the lack of understanding about the interaction in designated simulation environments. It is impractical to carry out live experiments where thousands of people are evacuated from buildings designed for every possible emergency condition. There has been progress in understanding human movement, human motion synthesis, crowd dynamics, indoor environments, and their relationships with active shooter events, but challenges remain. This paper presents a virtual reality (VR) experimental setup for conducting virtual evacuation drills in response to extreme events and demonstrates the behavior of agents during an active shooter environment. The behavior of agents is implemented using behavior trees in the Unity gaming engine. The VR experimental setup can simulate human behavior during an active shooter event in a campus setting. A presence questionnaire (PQ) was used in the user study to evaluate the effectiveness and engagement of our active shooter environment. The results show that majoritymore »of users agreed that the sense of presence was increased when using the emergency response training environment for a building evacuation environment.« less
4. Be prepared: How training and emergency type affect evacuation behaviour

   https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12812  

   Liu, Ruying ; Zhu, Runhe ; Becerik‐Gerber, Burcin ; Lucas, Gale M. ; Southers, Erroll G. ( April 2023 , Journal of Computer Assisted Learning)

   Video‐based training has been widely adopted by private organizations and public authorities to educate occupants on various types of building emergencies. However, the effectiveness of video‐based training for preparing occupants for building emergencies has not been rigorously studied nor has the impact of emergency type been investigated on training effectiveness.

   This study examines whether video‐based training is an effective method to prepare occupants for building emergencies and how the effectiveness differs in the context of different building emergencies.

   We simulated fire and active shooter emergencies in a virtual office building and conducted evacuation experiments to examine participants' emergency responses using both objective and subjective metrics. A total of 108 participants were recruited and responded to the fire or active shooter incident with or without video‐based training.

   The results revealed that participants with video‐based training more often chose to follow other recommendations when responding to building emergencies instead of simply following others. Results from ANOVA showed that training increased participants' self‐efficacy significantly, especially for those in the active shooter group. Moreover, participants in the active shooter simulation had a higher level of response efficacy than those in the fire emergency simulation. Our results also demonstrated the influence ofmore »emergency type on participants' final decisions and considerations of the recommendations.

   Our results suggested that video‐based training is effective in improving participants' emergency preparedness and changing their behaviour patterns to a certain extent such as reducing following behaviour and encouraging safe evacuations. Additionally, statistically significant interactions between video‐based training and emergency types suggested that training effectiveness should be considered in accordance with the emergency type.

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5. Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) module for training and patient safety

   https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2021.13.ERVR-178  

   Sharma, Sharad ; Bodempudi, Sri Teja ; Reehl, Aishwarya ( January 2021 , Electronic Imaging)

   Healthcare practitioners, social workers, and care coordinators must work together seamlessly, safely and efficiently. Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, understanding relevant evidence-based and best practices as well as identification of barriers and facilitators of care for vulnerable populations are of crucial importance. A current gap exists in the lack of specific training for these specialized personnel to facilitate care for socially vulnerable populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities. With continuing advancements in technology, VR based training incorporates real-life experience and creates a “sense of presence” in the environment. Furthermore, immersive virtual environments offer considerable advantages over traditional training exercises such as reduction in the time and cost for different what-if scenarios and opportunities for more frequent practice. This paper proposes the development of Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) training modules geared for COVID-19 testing. The VRI modules are developed for immersive, non-immersive, and mobile environment. This paper describes the development and testing of the VRI module using the Unity gaming engine. These VRI modules are developed to help increase safety preparedness and mitigate the social distancing related risks for safety management.