Too Hard, Too Easy, Just Right: Performance-Driven Challenge Adaptation in Virtual Reality Firefighter Training

Abstract

Effective firefighter training requires practice under dynamic and stressful emergency conditions, yet real-world live-fire exercises are costly, risky, and difficult to scale. Virtual Reality (VR) offers a safe and controllable alternative, but many existing VR firefighter training systems rely on fixed scenarios or provide limited difficulty adaptation, making it difficult to maintain an appropriate level of challenge for skill development as trainees' performance changes over time. To address this limitation, we present ProACT, a performance-driven adaptive training system that regulates scenario difficulty through closed-loop interactions between trainee performance and simulated fire dynamics. Specifically, ProACT combines a global module that continuously adjusts scene-level fire spread dynamics in real time based on trainee performance with a local module that periodically updates object-level flammability across the environment. Our evaluation shows that ProACT improves both objective training performance and subjective user experience compared with existing adaptive and non-adaptive baselines. We further discuss how adaptive immersive environments can extend beyond firefighting to broader training domains.