Chapter 3 52 The current study aims to close the research gaps surrounding VR for police, particularly regarding police officers’ training responses to VR SBT and their experiences with VR as a training tool. First, we investigate physical (i.e., heart rate, level of physical activity) and psychological (invested mental effort and perceived stress) training responses of police officers to VR SBT and RL SBT. Inherent differences between RL SBT and VR SBT exist (see for instance Giessing, 2021); therefore, we investigate the differences of the two training modalities as they are currently used in police practice (e.g., short sequences of VR scenarios; long, extensive reality-based scenarios). Examining the physical and psychological responses to the two types of training may highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each and how they can be used to complement each other. Second, we investigate factors (i.e., participant characteristics and VRspecific experiences) that we hypothesize to influence the psychological training responses (i.e., invested mental effort and perceived stress) of police officers. Understanding how participant characteristics (such as age or experience with technology) and VR-specific experiences (such as sense of presence or the experience of negative effects) relate to or influence psychological training responses may provide initial guidelines on how VR SBT can be tailored to be integrated into existing training frameworks. Thus, the current study takes a first step at investigating the application of VR for dynamic, interactive SBT and how police officers (physically and psychologically) respond to and experience VR as a training technology. METHODS This study was conducted in collaboration with the Dutch National Police. We conducted our experiment around the annual training days of the special intervention unit with a primary focus on close protection tasks (e.g., ensuring safety of clients, assessing security, and providing surveillance). By conducting our experiments as part of the annual training days, we were able to test and assess the training modalities RL SBT and VR SBT as they are applied in practice. This means that we utilized a large-scale scenario set-up with various role-players and props in the RL SBT, followed by a verbal debrief with the instructor. Comparatively, for VR SBT we utilized three short scenarios (to highlight the possibility of training a variety of adaptable scenarios in a short time) in combination with the possibility to receive an objective after-action review after each scenario. Hence, this study was not set up to compare identical trainings in real-life and VR environments but to compare the physical and psychological training responses to RL SBT and VR SBT as applied in practice.
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