Towards Immersive Virtual Environments for Safety and Design Scenarios in Educational Buildings

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly used to simulate complex environments, offering new opportunities for safety training, spatial analysis, and experiential learning. Virtual environments (VE) can act as a bridge between spatial representation and simulation, enabling users to experience and interact with safety-related elements such as escape routes, signage, and emergency devices. Particular attention is given to how such environments can support learning processes, allowing users to explore different configurations and observe how spatial and environmental variations affect behavior and decision-making. In this context, the work explores the design and development of an immersive VE based on the 3D virtualization of a real university building. The aim is to explore VR potential to support space design and management activities related to wellbeing, learning experiences, and training on safety-critical scenarios such as evacuation, orientation and wayfinding under emergency conditions. The pipeline has been tested though case study of the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin, resulting in an immersive VE for safety-oriented spatial exploration and scenario configuration. Although the current implementation is mainly qualitative, preliminary observations on navigability, rendering stability, and spatial readability were investigated. The work highlights the potential of immersive VE to support both training and evaluation for safety evaluation and redesign for better inclusion on different contexts, such as the educational one where learning and social activities are prioritized and are affected by spatial features. Limitations and opportunities for future integration with simulation, IoT environmental data and human in the loop data were considered.