Comparing the use of a ‘tabletop’ experiment and a collaborative desktop virtual environment for training police officers to deal with traffic accidents

 The Dubai police force currently trains its accident investigators using a mixture of theoretical training and on-the-job practical training. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of a virtual environment (VE) for training and performance testing traffic accident investigators. To justify the investment for virtual training we compare trainees’ performances against the less expensive method of using a tabletop exercise. Our results show that both our proposed training methods managed to improve the overall trainees’ performances. However, overall we have not found a significant difference in performance that could be clearly attributed to one method rather than the other. There are some indications that there is an advantage for one method of training over another according to the task required at a particular investigation stage. Subjective comments from the trainees favoured the use of the virtual environment. Both environments received positive remarks from the trainers who saw the potential of using them as training and testing environments before sending the trainees to real traffic accidents. Index Terms  traffic investigators training, tabletop training, virtual environment training.