A Social Virtual Reality Based Construction Safety Education System for Experiential Learning

The construction industry is a complex environment where high accident rates make significant contributions to cost overruns and time delays. Safety education is important in promoting a safe and healthful working environment in construction; however current pedagogical methods and tools at the tertiary level are unable to provide students with real practical and safety experiences. This study proposes an online social virtual reality (VR) system framework which allows students to perform role-playing, dialogic learning, and social interaction for construction safety and health education. The framework includes the following three modules: 1) Cooperative Distributed Safety Learning (CDSL) to understand root causes of accidents in construction site; 2) Hazard Inspection and Safety Cognition (HISC) to reflect on safety theories through hazard inspection within a social VR environment; 3) Active Safety Game-based Learning (ASGL) to enhance practical capacities by playing the safety training game in a 3D virtual environment. The system prototype is developed and evaluated with virtual scenarios derived from real safety cases to identify the system's benefits and limitations. The results concluded that the social/collaborative virtual reality platform would improve construction safety & health education effectively.