Creating a Stressful Decision Making Environment for Aerial Firefighter Training in Virtual Reality

The decisions made by an Air Attack Supervisor (AAS) helicopter co-pilots in aerial firefighting have critical and immediate impacts. It is difficult to always make fast, high quality decisions due to the mental and physical stress being experienced. Real world training exercises have limitations such as safety, cost, time and difficulty in reproducing events, making frequent training infeasible. Virtual Reality (VR) offers new training opportunities, but it is challenging to create a virtual environment with the analogous level of stress experienced in the real-world. In this paper, we investigate the use of a multi-user, collaborative, multi-sensory (vision, audio, tactile) VR system to produce a realistic training environment for practising aerial firefighting training scenarios. We focus on a comparison between our VR training system, an equivalent real-world field training and an existing radio-only exercise currently in use, where we compare Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) and self reported stress using the Short Stress State Questionnaire (SSSQ). We conducted the study with real trainee AAS firefighters to determine the effectiveness of the system. Our results show that there were no significant differences between the VR training exercise and the real-world exercise in terms of the level of stress, measured by HRV, and no significant difference between VR and radio-only exercises, as reported by the SSSQ.