1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

During a catastrophic event, the ability of the personnel responsible for responding to such an event is due not only to a pre-existing knowledge or ability, but also to the degree of familiarity with the scenario that must be faced. Especially in the case of high-impact but potentially unlikely events, an appropriate response is based on the fact that staff are able to perform their assigned tasks with precision, and to coordinate efficiently with other operators. Psychological effects of stress due to having to face a situation to which the staff is unfamiliar can have a significant impact on performance, thus leading to a degradation in the effectiveness of the intervention and the consequent loss of human life.
The recent development of technologies in the field of virtual reality and augmented reality has made available a new level of interaction between people, generating new ways of communicating and transmitting knowledge, which can strongly improve emergency operators training effectiveness.
The simulated reality environments can offer all the characteristics of conventional training techniques by reducing costs and development times of real exercises. In a virtual reality simulation, players can communicate, move from one point to another in an immersive 3D digital environment, perform manual actions, work on machineries, drive vehicles, interact with objects, events and other players hosted in the environment, everything in real-time. Each character is able to see the other players and their actions and can react by taking other actions, within a digital scenario that reproduces the real environment with a high level of fidelity. The simulations can be controlled by the figure of the "masters" (instructors) who can remotely follow all the actions performed by the operators who are carrying out the virtual simulation, create localized events (such as the breaking of a pipe, or the exhaustion of a material necessary for industrial processes) or introducing new critical issues such as an interruption of the electrical or telephone lines.
Virtual training systems also allow and facilitate the collaborative training of geographically distributed personnel; for example, virtual simulation can provide a consistent and synchronized training platform in the event of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes that require a geographically distributed response; in addition, a virtual reality system can make it possible to verify the efficiency of an emergency plan, thus identifying gaps and aspects that need to be improved.
It thus emerge a strong need to explore the potential of this evolving technology, creating innovative application case able to demonstrate all it potential in improving emergency operators training