Research on an educational virtual training system for ship life-saving appliances

Life-saving appliances (LSAs) play a crucial role in maritime emergencies, and seafarers need to undergo rigorous professional training on these appliances to ensure their competence in maritime work. However, traditional teaching and training that mainly rely on real appliances have several limitations. To address these limitations, we have developed a virtual training system that enables multiperson collaborative operation. To guarantee the system's scalability and versatility, the system framework is designed to be modular. In the networking function section, we establish a network architecture and apply state synchronization mechanisms to ensure consistent scenarios across multiusers. Additionally, we propose an interaction management model and an evaluation model for collaborative training and evaluation. Two collaborative training modes are designed to enhance the flexibility of the system. To evaluate the effectiveness of our system, we select 72 trainees to participate in a training and evaluation experiment. The evaluation model is validated by comparing it with expert evaluations. The results show that trainees can gain a better understanding of their roles and responsibilities and accurately remember the collaborative operation sequence. The training effect is positive, indicating that our system can effectively facilitate the teaching and training of LSAs.