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

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 standardized 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.