An Immersive Virtual Reality Training Environment for CBRN Procedures

Introduction

The CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) is a domain that encompasses procedures and practices required to deal with events associated with a wide range of risks, mainly caused by the deployment of mass-destruction weapons (NATO, 2018). These events differ from generic hazards since they are usually designed with malicious intents. The term refers the four risks that are considered by these procedures:

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  Chemical: indicates an explosion of a chemical weapon with toxic properties, such as Chlorine or Hydrogen cyanide. These weapons act with four different agent types, i.e., choking agents, blistering agents, blood agents, and nerve agents. This type of risk can spread over wide areas and is heavily inñuenced by the wind direction.

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  Biological: it is due to an attack performed using biological vectors, such as bacteria, viruses, or insects.

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  Radiological: it is caused by the use of a so-called “dirty bomb”, which can irradiate alpha and beta particles. This weapon combines explosive and radioactive material but is different than the atomic bomb since the explosion is smaller, and most of the risk comes from the radiological exposure rather than from the explosion itself.

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  Nuclear: it is associated with an attack performed with a nuclear weapon, such as a ðssion bomb. This attack produces massive damage to both the population and the environment.

Since the situations requesting the intervention of CBRN teams are often dangerous for all the involved actors, it is essential that operators correctly follow every step of the mandated response procedures defined by CBRN protocols. Training CBRN operators’ capacity to deal with these procedures represents a major challenge, since practical exercises usually involve instrumentations and vehicles with high maintenance costs, as well as the simultaneous participation of many subjects coming from different geographic areas. Moreover, to avoid severe risks for the trainees’ safety, the fidelity of the simulated scenarios could show inconsistencies and be too restrictive to achieve efficient training.

In order to cope with these problems, it is necessary to create alternative tools that can offer training experiences with a high level of realism, while minimizing the risks for the trainees. This outcome can be obtained by leveraging Virtual Reality (VR) technologies to create training experiences that can offer a series of advantages with respect to real trials:

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  Safety: using VR, it is possible to train a subject to engage in situations that he or she could not face safely in real life. For instance, it is possible to simulate a collapsing building without any risk.

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  Cost: training in a VR environment is less expensive than real-life training experiences. For instance, it is possible to train a subject to pilot a plane without using real aircrafts, thus lowering signiðcantly the associated costs.

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  Realism: even though VR is still not comparable, in terms of realism, with a real exercise, it enables the simulation of various situations that subjects could hardly face in real life. An explosion, for instance, could be witnessed from a close distance in a VR environment.

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  Repeatability: a VR simulation can be easily repeated multiple times, thus letting a subject to master the considered procedure with a trial-and-error approach, without the need to organize a real exercise every time.