Head-Mounted, Display-Based Immersive Virtual Reality Marine-Engine Training System: A Fully Immersive and Interactive Virtual Reality Environment

Abstract

Simulation technology has been used to train marine engineers for decades. However, traditional marine-engine training systems (METSs) possess low immersion levels that seriously limit their effect. To overcome this problem, we developed a head-mounted, display-based immersive virtual reality (IVR) METS based on HTC Vive Pro hardware. Like the traditional METS, it has training and automatic evaluation functions. Moreover, it can reproduce, with high degrees of immersion, all of the details of a real ship engine room and vividly simulate emergency scenes, such as a fire, so that trainers can perform various operations as though they were in the real environment. Thirty students majoring in marine engineering at Dalian Maritime University, China, were selected to test the system. The results showed that the headmounted, display-based immersive VR METS had many advantages compared to the desktop VR METS.