V3S, a Virtual Environment for Risk Management Training

Abstract

In high risk industries, risk management training has become a major issue. It requires not only to teach rules and procedures, but also to promote a real understanding of the risks that are at stake and to train learners to work in degraded situations (stress, difficult co-activity, damaged equipment...). In this paper, we present the outcomes of the V3S project. This project resulted in a virtual environment focused on the visualization of errors consequences, whether they are made by the learner or by the virtual autonomous characters that populate this environment. To allow the representation of errors and compromises, we developed a task description language to model learners' and autonomous characters' situated knowledge about their tasks. These models are used to monitor learners' actions and to generate virtual characters' behaviours. The evaluation has shown a high satisfaction level and encouraging usability measures. As a future work, we propose to extend the possibilities of the simulation through the creation and monitoring of adaptive scenarios. Our objective here is twofold: support roleplay-like learning situations inspired by game-based learning and interactive storytelling, and dynamically adapt the difficulty to learner's performances by adjusting the behaviour of virtual characters able to assist or disrupt the user.