Virtual Reality (VR) provides great opportunities for police officers to train decision-making and acting (DMA) in cognitively demanding and stressful situations. This paper presents a summary of findings from a three-year project, including requirements collected from experienced police trainers and industry experts, and quantitative and qualitative results of human factor studies and field trials. Findings include advantages of VR training such as the possibility to safely train high-risk situations in controllable and reproducible training environments, include a variety of avatars that would be difficult to use in real-life training (e.g., vulnerable populations or animals) and handle dangerous equipment (e.g., explosives) but also highlight challenges such as tracking, locomotion and intelligent virtual agents. The importance of strong alignment between training didactics and technical possibilities is highlighted and potential solutions presented. Furthermore training outcomes are transferable to real-world police duties and may apply to other domains that would benefit from simulation-based training.

Virtual Reality (VR) training has become increasingly important for police first responders in recent years. Improving the training experience in such complex contexts requires ecological validity of virtual training. To achieve this, VR systems need to be capable of simulating the complex experiences of police officers ‘in the field.’ One way to do this is to add stressors into training simulations to induce stress similar to the stress experienced in real-life situations, particularly in situations where this is difficult (e.g., dangerous or resource-intensive) to achieve with traditional training. To include stressors in VR, this paper thus presents the concept of so-called ‘stress cues’ for operationalizing stressors to augment training in VR simulations for the context of police work. Considering the level of complexity of police work and training, a co-creation process that allows for creative collaboration and mitigation of power imbalances was chosen to access the police officers’ knowledge and experience. We assert that stress cues can improve the training experience from the trainer’s perspective as they provide novel interaction design possibilities for trainers to control the training experience. E.g., by actively intervening in training and dynamically changing the interaction space for trainees which also improves the trainee’s experience. Stress cues can also improve the trainee’s experience by enabling personalizable and customizable training based on real-time stress measurements and supplementing information for improved training feedback.

The increasing use of video-links has sparked debate on whether online proceedings can ensure fair trials. Legal research often claims that physical presence is essential for legitimacy and effective participation but fails to support this assumption with an empirical basis. This article explores the role of physical presence in criminal trials through procedural justice theory, focusing on perceptions of voice (telling one’s side of the story) and respect (being treated with dignity), to assess how online trials might affect these aspects. Findings on meaningful participation in online hearings are mixed, but research on telepsychology and telemedicine suggest that high levels of empathy and strong working relationships can be maintained. The authors highlight the need for further empirical studies on how online trials influence perceptions of fairness, especially regarding judicial empathy and interpersonal dynamics, and stress the importance of adopting a receptive mindset toward the new opportunities online criminal proceedings may present in this regard.

Creating Virtual Reality (VR) systems with high scenario fidelity is crucial, especially for scenario-based VR training. However, participatory VR design processes often require participants to have design knowledge, technical skills, or access to high-fidelity prototyping tools. Here, we present the development and evaluation of the co-design method CoLEBricks which uses building blocks for the co-creation of VR training scenarios for first responders. From the exploratory findings, we conclude that CoLEBricks supports end users in sharing needs and wishes regarding complex VR training scenarios, thereby ensuring the integration of relevant and realistic scenarios.

Participatory Design (PD) has become a versatile, often-used design practice. However, its legitimacy is often criticised due to a lack of empirically backed benefits or impact. This impedes PD’s ability to convey its benefits to its stakeholders, other disciplines, and society at large, making progress in the field more difficult. One way to address these criticisms is using systematic evaluations in PD. While evaluation frameworks for PD exist, they are rarely used or built upon, and results from evaluations are seldom disseminated. Thus, this paper presents a systematic evaluation of the first year of a participatory project for developing a Virtual Reality training system as a case study. We discuss the impacts of systematic, explicit evaluations on PD practitioners, the PD community, and beyond. The work, therefore, contributes to establishing and developing evaluation as a practice in PD to enhance knowledge-building and accountability.