EDUCATIONAL APPLICATION OF VIRTUAL REALITY IN SAFETY TRAINING

Safety issues are an important theme for society. Accidents can generate big financial and social loses with serious, hard and, sometimes, even irreparable consequences for people and companies. According to data provided by the Spanish Ministry of Labour and Immigration in 2015 there were 479.577 occupational accidents in Spain with medical leave. Other studies show that every three-and-a half seconds a European worker is forced to stay at home for at least three working days due to a labour accident.

The lack of basic safety knowledge and awareness is considered as one of the main reasons for workers being involved in unsafe behaviour. Workers should have competencies for execute their job safely. With this aim, the most important tool for risk prevention is the safety training.

The current safety education system has limited effectiveness. In order to contribute to the improvement of the educational practices in this context, the present work will analyse the educational affordances provided by virtual reality to create realistic and engaging safety learning experiences.

Virtual Reality (VR) allows to expose trainees to risky situations without any real danger for them. This a great added value of this technology, because in many senses, safety learning is really an experiential process, that in many cases, cannot be reproduced due to its risky nature.

New technological developments have supported a new generation of VR hardware with a very interesting performance/price rate (see for example HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets) that breaks some of the barriers for the real implementation of this technology. Also new mobile Virtual Reality platforms (such a Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR) open the door to cheap implementation of a more basic VR experience that can support blended learning.

The present study will also analyse the capability of virtual environments to induct emotions with the aim of a more efficient learning. Safety virtual learning environments can be designed to manage stress, fear, and anxiety, that are emotional states that can have an important impact on the trainee’s performance to develop tasks under risky conditions.