Multi-Level Virtual Reality System for Marine Education and Training

Full Mission Marine Simulator (FMMS) is a fully immersive Visual Reality (VR) System for marine education and training and is valuable and effective for fostering the qualified and competent seafarer. However, many problems, such as limited accessibility, high expenditure, and difficult maintenance etc, limit their pervasive use. Then we developed a partially immersive Desktop Marine Teaching System (DMTS) based FMMS which is low cost and easy to maintenance. Furthermore, one Web-based Marine Training Environment (WMTE) is proposed, which fully combining web technology, high fidelity simulation, and e-learning tools to create a more cost-effective and flexible training environment. In this paper, FMMS, DMTS and WMTE are combined together and supplemented each other to a multi-level VR system in the whole marine training process. Experimental results demonstrated that the multi-level VR system can provide a consistent and more effective medium for improving marine education and training.