Designing a Collaborative Safety Training Experience in Virtual Reality

Recently, the utilization of videoconferencing applications has had a substantial increase in a wide range of domains, including meetings, conferences, educational activities, and safety training. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the pivotal role these tools play in how businesses and public institutions coordinate and oversee their employees’ activities. They offer the distinct advantage of accommodating a virtually unlimited number of participants, surmounting geographical constraints, and curbing the costs associated with organization and travel, all while contributing to improved environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, the challenge of maintaining social interaction and engagement remains when individuals work remotely using such tools, particularly in scenarios where physical proximity with others is necessary for effective learning or training processes. Safety training is a critical aspect of disaster preparedness and prevention. Traditional safety training methods often lack realism and fail to adequately prepare people for real-world emergencies, especially in a cooperative context. This article presents the design of an immersive multi-user experience of safety training and proposes a collaborative environment for fire extinguisher training by using the Meta Quest 2 headset. Learning the procedures before operating in a real setting is the way to avoid operators’ mistakes can have serious consequences on process operation and safety. We also described how to organize the training activities and conduct the evaluation.