The fire safety can be one of the biggest problems in metropolitan area. To reduce injuries in a fire, the virtual reality based behavioural skills training (BST) has been used to train people to survive in emergency circumstance. VR-based BST training has been demonstrated to effectively help people of different ages to acquire safe escape skills in a virtual environment. However, most of people have encountered difficulty to train in a right gesture or poor body performance, such as running at unsuitable body position. Gesture-based technology can effectively help people to learn the correct gestures in order to enhance training efficiency. Thus, this paper proposes a theoretical framework of “VR-Gesture BST”, which is expected to improve behavioural skills training more effectively for fire safety training. It adopts motion capture device obtaining user’s body data to evaluate the body performance during the BST training. The outcomes of the study provide guideline and suggestions for VR based design in practice of the behavioural skills training adopted gesture-based technology.

Virtual reality (VR) creates a virtual environment for learning and education as its strong sense of presence and real-time interactivity. Much research focus on the issues of VR hardware and platform, however, little research involve the design of user interface in VR systems. Different from other interface, a VR interface is designed as a floating menu that virtually presented in the front of users. This paper aims to investigate the influence of user experience from the various spatial reference frames and how three spatial reference frames based user interface and the sense of presence impact user performance in the virtual environment. We developed a VR game for fire safety training and evaluated three types of VR user interface commonly used in VR systems. Sixty participants were involved in this evaluation based on the task completion times, completion rates and error rates. Our results show that the spatial reference frames can be critical important to the user experience when users interact with the game in the virtual environment. We found that the user interface of different spatial reference frames also has significant difference in the sense of presence and user performance of virtual environment.