A Transferable Psychological Evaluation of Virtual Reality Applied to Safety Training in Chemical Manufacturing

17 September 2020, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

High-profile accidents in the Chemical sector – across research and manufacturing scales – have provided strong drivers to develop a new benchmark in safety training and compliance. Herein, we describe the design, implementation, and standardised psychological evaluation of Virtual Reality (VR) applied to process safety training. Through a specific industrial case study, we show that testable learning of complex safety-specific tasks in VR is statistically equivalent to traditional slide-based video training. However, VR training presents a measurable positive improvement on trainees’ perception of overall learning, and their feeling of presence in the task during training. It has also been shown that knowledge retention from video lectures can be overestimated, if not controlled. Through these results – and our transferable blueprint for robustly assessing any new VR training platform – we envisage a range of technologically-enabled efforts to enhance safety performance in both laboratory and plant-based activities. Implications for physical resource-saving projects are also described.

Keywords

process safety
training
virtual reality
chemical manufacturing
ammonia
psychology
safety
video

Comments

Comments are not moderated before they are posted, but they can be removed by the site moderators if they are found to be in contravention of our Commenting Policy [opens in a new tab] - please read this policy before you post. Comments should be used for scholarly discussion of the content in question. You can find more information about how to use the commenting feature here [opens in a new tab] .
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy [opens in a new tab] and Terms of Service [opens in a new tab] apply.