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Project

Virtual Reality Serious Game for Chemical Lab Safety Training in Industry and Academia: from Design, Development to Increased Motivation and Engagement

Chemical laboratories are workplace environments where risks of injury and even fatality are always present. Laboratory workers, in academia and industry, are required to have proficient safety awareness in order to minimise risk to an acceptable level. However, investigation reports and reviews on laboratory accidents reveal that, due to lack of safety awareness and at-risk behaviour, unfortunate events still happen. Insufficient safety training is often identified as one of the causes for these accidents.

Commonly, safety training interventions are given by means of conventional teaching methods, such as classroom lectures, videos and printed manuals. However, with these methods, trainees are required to listen to the instructor or read long textual paragraphs. They are passive in their learning process and can lose their attention quickly when they are not motivated, thus making the safety training ineffective. Virtual reality (VR) technology can be used as a hands-on training tool to simulate dangerous situations in a virtual environment where trainees can train their safety awareness without causing real harm to themselves or others. A combination of this technology with a serious game approach could make safety training more motivating and engaging than conventional training methods.

Therefore, this doctoral research project exploits immersive virtual reality technology to fully immerse the learning in a virtual laboratory environment, where laboratory safety is trained without putting the learner in danger.  In particular, this research wants to obtain a better understanding of the motivation and engagement of employees following safety training in an immersive VR environment. However, designing and developing a VR serious game for this specific purpose is a challenging task. There are many factors to consider for an optimal training game. For this reason, the aim of this research is to not only verify if motivation and engagement are increased by using this immersive tool, but also to formulate guidelines on how to design, develop and implement such VR games for safety training. In this dissertation, an example is shown of the design and development process of a VR serious game, called VR LaboSafe Game. The guidelines established from this process are generic and can be applied to the development of other similar VR safety training programmes. These guidelines include the integration of instructional design, game design and VR considerations. Also, online resources and optimisation techniques are suggested in order to support self-directed learning of VR game development.

During the development of VR LaboSafe Game, tests were performed on academic and industrial population in order to analyse the system usability and simulator sickness after playing early versions of the game. This is to ensure that the game is easy-to-use and does not induce severe simulator sickness before performing further evaluation studies. A test with a first version of VR LaboSafe Game 1.0 revealed that displaying tutorial instructions only in a textual format could be the cause of low system usability. This test also showed that long continuous VR exposure (>40 minutes) could lead to mild simulator sickness symptoms. Therefore, the VR game was adjusted to reduce textual information, include spoken instructions and introduce guiding animations. Players are also allowed to take breaks from VR between game levels. A test with this updated version VR LaboSafe Game 2.0 indeed confirmed that system usability and simulator sickness are improved compared to the version 1.0. This VR LaboSafe Game 2.0 is then suitable to use in further studies.

In an evaluation study with the VR LaboSafe Game, more person-centred variables were examined in order to determine how motivated and engaged employees of a chemical company are for safety training with a conventional method and with VR serious game. From this experiment, lab technicians and managers tend to be personally motivated to follow safety training for their own safety and the safety of others. However, they find safety training to be repetitive, passive and easy to lose attention when it is presented with conventional training methods. Results show that employees find safety training with a VR serious game more intrinsically motivating and engaging than conventional training methods. However, complicated usability and the unfamiliarity of VR can affect their autonomous motivation for safety training. Notably, older employees (above 50 years old) have more difficulties with using VR headsets than younger employees (under 30 years old). Despite this complication, employees intend to follow VR safety training more than with a conventional method. It is suggested to combine conventional methods with VR as complementary tool and provide more frequent and smaller sessions, gradually introducing VR technology to beginners.

The outcomes of this thesis are two-fold: 1) a set of guidelines are demonstrated about the design, development and implementation of VR serious games for safety training, and 2) a functional artefact is created to teach lab safety awareness. With the use of this artefact, it has been proven that VR serious games increases the intrinsic motivation and engagement of trainees for safety training. However, before fully deploying VR training programmes, consideration must be taken into account to let people familiarise with VR technology.

Date:3 Oct 2019 →  21 Mar 2023
Keywords:Virtual Reality, Health, Safety and Environment, Serious Game, Chemical Industry, Training
Disciplines:Virtual reality and related simulation, Occupational health and safety, Instructional psychology and instructional design
Project type:PhD project