Creating a Virtual Training Environment for Traffic Accident Investigation for the Dubai Police Force

A. BinSubaih, "Creating a Virtual Training Environment for Traffic Accident Investigation for the Dubai Police Force", PhD, 2007. (Supervisor: Dr Steve Maddock; second supervisor: Dr Daniela Romano). [pdf (author's copy)]

PhD Abstract: This research investigates the use of gaming technology (especially game engines) in developing virtual training environments, and comprises of two main parts. The first part of the thesis investigates the creation of an architecture that allows a virtual training environment (i.e. a 'game') to be portable between different game engines. The second part of the thesis examines the learning effectiveness of a virtual training environment developed for traffic accident investigators in the Dubai police force. The second part also serves to evaluate the scalability of the architecture created in the first part of the thesis.

Current game development addresses different aspects of portability, such as porting assets and using middleware for physics. However, the game itself is not so easily portable. The first part of this thesis addresses this by making the three elements that represent the game's brain portable. These are the game logic, the object model, and the game state, which are collectively referred to in this thesis as the game factor, or G-factor. This separation is achieved by using an architecture called game space architecture (GSA), which combines a variant of the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to separate the G-factor (the model) from the game engine (the view) with on-the-fly scripting to enable communication through an adapter (the controller). This enables multiple views (i.e. game engines) to exist for the same model (i.e. G-factor). The principal findings from the evaluation process reveal that GSA is capable of servicing the same G-factor to multiple game engines and that it supports modifiability. They also reveal that GSA adds little development overhead. The ability of GSA to scale to real world applications is demonstrated by the development of a virtual training environment.

The second part of the thesis examines the development of a virtual training environment for traffic accident investigators in the Dubai police force. Their training needs were identified in a field study conducted in the summer of 2004 to assess the current training methods of lectures and on-the-job training. The virtual environment was then developed by combining game design and instructional design to ensure the learning objectives were integral to the gameplay. To evaluate the learning effectiveness of the virtual environment an experiment was conducted in February and March of 2006 for fifty-six police officers from the Dubai police force. They were divided into two groups: novices (0 to 2 years experience) and experienced investigators (with more than 2 years experience). The experiment revealed significant performance improvements in both groups, with the improvement reported in novices significantly higher than the one reported in experienced investigators.

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