(165a) Immersive Virtual Reality Applications in Safety Training

The oil and gas industry often requires people to work in hazardous environments and to operate complicated equipment which often limits the type of training that is carried out on site. The conventional safety training imposes several challenges both in terms of cost and risk. More often than not, it is unsafe or even dangerous to expose trainees to real working environments for the purposes of training. This fact has motivated safety professionals to explore further innovative ways to remedy the problem. Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) has been proposed as a technological breakthrough that holds the power to facilitate learning, which exposes personnel to hazardous situations in a safe, highly visual and interactive manner. IVR has been proven to enhance understanding, improve knowledge retention, and provides realistic scenarios tailored towards the audience.