Collaborative Research: Immersive Virtual Reality with Haptic Feedback to Improve Safety Hazard Recognition, Assessment, and Decision-Making Among Construction Professionals

建筑业每年造成数百人死亡，数十万人非致命伤害。目前的安全培训模式不能有效地使从业人员做好安全建造的准备。研究表明，安全学习在很大程度上是通过经验学习发生的，特别是当个人亲身经历或目睹伤害时。虽然这些经验可能对学习有影响，但为了学习安全的建筑实践，不可能等待所有从业人员遭受（或目睹）严重伤害。因此，这项工作旨在探索使用越来越实惠的虚拟现实和触觉反馈技术来提供逼真而安全的学习环境，旨在复制历史上现场发生的伤害类型。研究小组将开发建筑工地培训模块，参与者可以在虚拟工作现场导航，目的是识别安全隐患。与之前基于虚拟现实的安全培训不同，当危险被忽视时，用户将看到、听到和感受到触觉反馈，以模拟错过危险的后果。研究小组将在实验治疗之前、期间和之后收集数据，以确定这种模拟模式在多大程度上支持用户的安全学习。该团队设想，通过研究沉浸式虚拟体验如何在心理层面上影响学习者，使他们关心安全，从而促进与安全建筑实践相关的学习，这项工作将为研究人员和从业人员提供证据，以指导他们对使用增强的安全培训模拟感兴趣。本研究的目标是：(1)创建一个全新的、完全沉浸式的虚拟现实安全教育环境，当危险未被识别和未解决时，该环境可以向用户提供触觉反馈；(2)衡量与传统媒体相比，这种环境下的教学对建筑安全学习成果的促进程度；(3)测量和解释在这个多媒体丰富的环境中网络学习的心理中介。本研究的研究问题是：如何将触觉技术与虚拟现实技术相结合，为建筑安全教育创造沉浸式的可视化体验；在多大程度上，虚拟现实触觉激活情绪唤醒，产生态势感知，并通过多媒体促进有意义的安全学习？在这项工作中定义的实验将能够测试解释性假设，检查情绪唤醒和情境兴趣在网络学习过程中的中介作用。关于多媒体学习的定性发现将通过与研究对象的开放式建设性访谈来解释。这项工作将为开发和使用沉浸式网络学习体验提供一种新的方法，旨在改善建筑安全培训。这将推进与设计网络学习环境相关的知识体系，并将为这种教育模式影响安全学习的方式提供经验证据。就广泛的影响而言，这项工作的直接目的是教人们减少伤害和拯救生命的行为。此外，这项工作旨在使用可扩展且具有成本效益的媒介来瞄准这种学习形式，这可能会扩大对这种关键形式的网络学习的访问。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The construction industry accounts for hundreds of fatalities and hundreds of thousands of non-fatal injuries annually. The current modes of safety training do not effectively prepare practitioners to build safely. Research shows that safety learning occurs to a great extent through experiential learning - especially when individuals experience or witness an injury firsthand. While these experiences may be impactful for learning, it is impossible to wait for all practitioners to sustain (or witness) a serious injury in order to learn safe construction practices. Therefore, this work aims to explore the use of increasingly affordable virtual reality and haptic feedback technologies to provide realistic, yet safe, learning environments that aim to replicate the types of situations where injuries have historically occurred onsite. The research team will develop construction site training modules where participants may navigate a virtual job site with the aim of identifying safety hazards. Unlike prior virtual-reality-based safety training, when hazards go unnoticed, users will see, hear, and feel haptic feedback to simulate the ramifications of the missed hazard. The research team will collect data before, during, and after experimental treatments to determine the extent to which this mode of simulation supports safety learning among users. The team envisions this work providing evidence to guide both researchers and practitioners interested in using enhanced safety training simulations by studying how immersive virtual experiences can impact learners on a psychological level to make them care about safety in order to catalyze learning related to safe construction practices.The objectives of this research are to (1) create a novel and fully immersive Virtual Reality safety education environment that provides haptic feedback to users when hazards go unrecognized and unaddressed; (2) measure the extent to which instruction in this environment enhances learning outcomes in construction safety compared to traditional media; and (3) measure and explain the psychological mediators of cyberlearning in this multimedia-rich environment. The following research questions guide this study: How can haptic technology be incorporated with Virtual Reality technology to create an immersive visualization experience for construction safety education; and to what extent does Virtual Reality with haptic activate emotional arousal, generate situational awareness, and foster meaningful safety learning through multimedia? The experiment defined in this work will enable testing of explanatory hypotheses that examine the mediating roles of emotional arousal and situational interest in the cyberlearning process. Qualitative findings regarding multimedia learning will be explained using open-ended constructive interviews with the research subjects. This work will provide a novel approach for developing and using immersive cyberlearning experiences aimed at improving construction safety training. This will advance the body of knowledge related to designing cyberlearning environments, and will also provide empirical evidence of the ways in which this mode of education impacts safety learning. In terms of broad impact, this work directly aims to teach behaviors that will reduce injuries and save lives in construction. Furthermore, this work aims to target this form of learning using a scalable and cost-effective medium, which may broaden access to this critical form of cyberlearning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.