The continuous entry of new players in the market of Virtual Reality (VR) is leading to a greater accessibility of technology which, in turn, is attracting the interest of new institutions and stimulating the launch of novel projects in diverse fields. One example is given by the city of Turin, Italy, partner of the European Project PACTESUR2 aimed at introducing VR technology in the education of Municipal Police agents, developing a number of educational tools designed to prepare the polices of the involved cities to face possible terroristic events and manage the security of urban areas respecting standardized operational protocols.

In the frame of the project, the objective of this paper is to present the work developed in cooperation with the city of Turin in regard to the design of a VR platform supporting education and evaluation activities on operational protocols targeted to different security and emergency bodies. The platform, implemented in Unity, is designed to be flexible and adapt to different languages and contexts, although so far it is targeted to specific case studies in the cities of Madrid and Nice.

The platform enables the assessment of operators’ behavior in safe digital environments that faithfully simulate the real ones, removing the need to physically replicate the experiences of interest. The platform is structured in two sections: a first section that mimics a possible headquarter of the above bodies, where the users can familiarize with the commands of the VR experience and select the scenario and role they want to experience; a second section corresponding to the actual simulation, which develops according to a story-question paradigm, with narrative scenes in which the users can move and act followed by scenes in which they are asked to answer specific questions on the protocol to follow in the specific simulated situation.

The scenarios created for the two cities, which have been developed to offer an overview of the platform functionalities as well as to study its potentialities and limitations, differ in the following aspects: the Madrid scenario is linear, includes just one role and develops partly in an open urban landscape, partly in closed office spaces; the Nice scenarios, in turn, lets the users take two different roles in the same story, which is framed in a city park.

The current version of the platform has been presented in a police event held in Madrid, where feedback has been collected on the simulation. Results were encouraging and showed how the platform can help users to improve the perception of their own knowledge and skills in an accessible, engaging, and secure way.

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Education, Evaluation.