Chemical laboratories are workplace environments where risks of injury and even fatality are always present. Laboratory workers, in academia and industry, are required to have proficient safety awareness in order to minimise risk to an acceptable level. However, investigation reports and reviews on laboratory accidents reveal that, due to lack of safety awareness and at-risk behaviour, unfortunate events still happen. Insufficient safety training is often identified as one of the causes for these accident, but we believe that the lack of a real life experience of risks and, at that point, immersive training comes into play. For this reason, researchers of the European Training Network CHARMING have collaborated to develop a laboratory safety training, called “VR LaboSafe Game”, that utilises Virtual Reality (VR) technology and serious game design to train the safety awareness and safety behaviour of laboratory workers. By using a VR head-mounted display, the trainees are fully immersed in a virtual laboratory performing realistic tasks that are otherwise too expensive or dangerous to replicate in real life. In this game, laboratory workers learn to accurately identify risks, minimise these risks and perform experiments safely. Unsafe behaviour and unresolved risks result in simulated consequences that trainees experience without real harm to themselves or others.

In this GitHub repository you can download a demo version of the VR LaboSafe Game and try it out yourself!

These are the software and hardware you need to install the VR LaboSafe Game Demo:

• SideQuest software
• Oculus Quest 2 VR headset

In this repository you can find an .apk file of VR LaboSafe Game Demo in Releases. Installing this .apk file onto the Oculus Quest 2 is fairly easy. There is a nice and clear guide that you can follow here: UploadVR GUIDE: How To Sideload Content On Oculus Quest Using SideQuest – Mobile And PC (Updated 2021)

Contributors:

• Game designer, developer and researcher: Philippe Chan (Arkema & KU Leuven)
• Assessment framework researcher: Ryo Toyoda (Newcastle University)
• Learning analytics display researcher: Tim Gallagher (Utrecht University)

Supervisory:

• Dr. Jean-Luc Dubois (Arkema)
• Prof. Dr. Kristel Bernaerts (KU Leuven)
• Prof Dr. Tom Van Gerven (KU Leuven)
• Prof. Dr. Jarka Glassey (Newcastle University)
• Dr. Fernando José Russo Abbegão (Newcastle University)
• Prof. Dr. Liesbeth Kester (Utrecht University)
• Dr. Bert Slof (Hanzehogeschool Groningen)
  
  

This project has received funding from the European Union's EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under Grant Agreement 812716.