Preliminary Experiments with EVA - Serious Games Virtual Fire Drill Simulator

Abstract: Fire keeps claiming a large number of victims in building fires. Although there are ways to minimize such events, fire drills are used to train the building occupants for emergency situations. However, organizing and implement these exercises is a complex task, and sometimes not sucessfull. Furthermore, fire drills require the mobilization of some finantial resources and time, and affect the normal functioning of the site where they occur. To overcome the aforementioned issues, computer games have a set of features that might overcome this problem. They offer engagement to their players, keeping them focused, and providing training to real life situations. The game evaluate users, providing them some feedback, making possible for the players to improve their performance. The proposed methodology aims to study the viability of using a game that recreates a fire drill in a 3D environment using Serious Games. The information acquired through the player's performance is very valuable and will be later used to implement an artificial population. A sample of 20 subjects was selected to test the application. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the exercise had a positive impact on users. Moreover, the data acquired is of great important and will be later used to demonstrate the possibility of creating an artificial population based on human behaviour.