VIRTUAL REALITY AS AN IMMERSIVE TRAINING TOOL FOR WORKPLACE SAFETY
Using virtual reality in workplace safety training is undoubtedly an innovative opportunity to gain risk awareness, and therefore improve emergency management.
With this immersive technology, operators can experience realistic but simulated critical situations first-hand, without incurring real danger but learning in practice how to deal with them.
In this way it is possible to overcome one of the typical limits of the security context, in which training often remains too theoretical, precisely because of the difficulty of simulating the dangerous scenario. The use of VR can allow, instead, to directly experience a plausible situation, personally experimenting with the management of the criticality through a special visor.
The AXIS Project
The experimental project was born from this basic consideration AXIS born from the collaboration between PIAZZA COPERNICO, Department of General Psychology ofUniversity of Padua and TXT e-tech (TXT Group), which obtained co-financing under the IRISS Call promoted by SMACT Competence Center.
AXIS, an acronym for Appraisal with eXperiential Immersive Simulation, aims to study the different training experiences of adults in the safety field through the use of VR.
The technology underlying the research project is the Virtual Reality, which encourages active exploration of the scenario through the logic of gamification. And therefore it is a suitable tool to develop an effective, verifiable and measurable learning experience, satisfying in a fun way the training needs in this area.
Furthermore, the possibility of repeating the virtual experience several times helps to consolidate the acquired skills, increasing the levels of attention and motivation, and reducing errors.
Seeing is believing
Experimentation is now at a fairly advanced stage, and it is already possible to try out the VR viewer in a complex scenario such as a fire situation.
The environment is extremely realistic, and allows you to immerse yourself in a practical situation of starting a fire to be guided, without risk, towards learning the safest and most effective solution to deal with the situation.