July 30, 2019
When we talk about safety training, most of us will think of boring training lectures and even more boring reading material. Although it’s a necessary evil, using these methods can be just that, boring, unengaging. What if there was a better way? Virtual reality presents a new method of safety training that is engaging, cost effective and significantly increases retention. Here are just a few benefits of using VR to provide employees with safety training.
Customisable
Most VR experiences are made using engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine, because of this, the ability to important 3D assets and change them is a very easy process. By creating templates of different environments, objects and characters; bespoke scenarios can be created that can be tailored with the industry the workers of the company operate in. This allows for custom-made training rather than generic training programs which may waste time and money with unnecessary training content.
Risk Assessment
Using 3D environments and virtual reality, an employee can be presented with a scenario or environment in which they would need to asses the risks they are presented, after identifying the risk they would then have choose the appropriate action to nullify these risks. These scenarios make employees more aware of the different risks that exist and what to do if they encounter these risks. Presenting risks in a more engaging way as well as having visual elements improves retention as its significantly more immersive than non-interactive learning material.
Retention
Retention is key to safety training as not retaining knowledge relating to health and safety can potentially endanger individuals. By providing workers with engaging VR safety training, which is visual and interactive, retention rates of the training material presented within the VR experience, will increase. Various companies have used VR for safety training purposes, for example UPS have seen an increase of their driver’s safety by 75% when it first implemented its own virtual reality safety training experience.
Safe, Controlled and Portable
Virtual reality health and safety training experiences offers training programs that are not only engaging and effective, but experiences which are risk-free. Rather than create real world scenarios for individuals to test on, employees can experience real world situations in the virtual reality world. Virtual reality safety training is also extremely portable and doesn’t require the individual to visit specific locations to receive training. This saves both time and money for the business.
Measurable
Using virtual reality for health and safety training, also has the added benefit that the actions the user takes within VR can be tracked. This means that the performance of individuals whilst undergoing health and safety training can be measured and a better picture of what they have learnt (and more importantly what they haven’t learnt) can be acquired. This also means the experience itself can be measured and elements can be changed to make the overall experience more effective at training workers.
Already so many companies, and a multitude of industries, are using virtual reality for health and safety training. The retention rate and the cost-effective nature of virtual reality training means that we’ll see more and more companies both small and large, use Virtual Reality experiences to train their employees.
If you have an idea you want created get in touch with us and we can bring it to life. Whether it’s a quick prototype, a full product or even just to brainstorm, our team will be here to help. From the beginnings of your prototype to the final product we can support you with professional advice and delivery.