Using Virtual Reality To Simulate And Study The Movements Of School Shooters

This paper uses virtual reality (VR) to immerse human subjects in an active school shooting scenario to generate ecologically valid models of school shooter movement and behavior. Historically, data recovered from U.S. school shootings has lacked the fidelity needed to model shooter movement; consequently, simulations have made significant assumptions about the movements of the shooter or victims. We therefore recruited participants in a human-subject study and asked them to act as a school shooter in a virtual reality simulation. We recorded movements, observations, and actions. Our results show that the behavior of our participants ($n=90$) was statistically equivalent to that of real-world shooters in most scenarios, using bounds from historical data. Additionally, we found that participant data can be used to fit an empirical model that more accurately predicts shooter movements in both unseen simulated ($-11.8 \%$) and real ($-24.4 \%$) data (in terms of final path error).