Enhancing fire hazard recognition through contextual virtual reality learning: a game design approach

Fire safety education and awareness campaigns are important in avoiding or reducing fire-related emergencies. Generally, these awareness campaigns are delivered through passive learning media; however, the growing incidents in the United Arab Emirates highlight that the current fire safety training and awareness campaigns lack the higher order of cognitive skills. Reviewing existing teaching techniques, we identified a significant gap in contextual learning, engagement, motivation, and immersion. We proposed an improved True-Context framework for representing fire hazards to learners, which is then implemented as the FireGuard game in virtual reality to provide contextual learning. Eight experts evaluated the FireGuard game. While the FireGuard game garnered overall confidence from the experts, they suggested several enhancements, including updating the user interface to display obtained and total scores, adding voice narration, and incorporating feedback to players. Additionally, they recommended implementing game progression through on-screen selection and introducing rewards to motivate players. Few recommendations were deferred due to user and hardware constraints; however, these suggestions are discussed as part of the future research scope. The experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of contextual virtual reality learning in addressing the limitations of conventional fire safety training by fostering temporal and situational awareness, contextual learning, engagement, and motivation.