Serious games are extremely popular in many industries. Existing, often graphically illustrated, learning content in the industry can be supplemented by a game-based approach to impart occupational health and safety knowledge and construction site safety in the form of interactive 3D games. While many serious game approaches in the domain of construction safety, health, and well-being in construction also allow a player, often limited to experiencing the role of a construction worker, to identify and mark hazards in virtual environments, the knowledge required to actively identify, avoid, and correct equivalent threads in real life is frequently not included. Using the Unity 3D engine, an exemplary serious game application is created in which the player can assume the role of a safety officer and inspect various work areas across multiple construction sites. The dialogs for non-player characters (NPC) and objects (hazards and distractors) are kept as simple as possible, while allowing the player to select from a variety of options based on the hazard’s content. Wrong decisions result in minor penalties in the game, but they also provide the opportunity to use directly related, relevant learning content and safety rules to avoid making similar mistakes in the future. Hazards that were not discovered after the virtual inspection walk are displayed and explained in detail. Instead of just a score on the training outcome, an automatic report of the virtual inspection walk is generated for later discussion with the trainer, providing structured feedback on the positive accomplishments as well as individual learning suggestions. The implementation is an early proof of concept for the creation of a far-reaching framework to use safety-related knowledge to quickly create valid virtual safety trainings and thus separating the valuable safety knowledge from the replaceable 3D representation.
Major contributions:
- Proof of concept of the author’s framework creates interactive representations of hazards and their counterparts (mitigation and correct condition after mitigation) very quickly based on validated construction safety information.
- Playful visualizations, like the low-poly examples, and realistic assets, like imported Building Information Models (BIM) and human avatars, allow different ways of interacting with the same meta-information.
- A non-programming person can very easily create the sought-after safety learning scenarios, using the same validated logic, hazards, and mitigation strategies, with different visualizations for different target audiences i.e., professionals in up-skilling activities, as well as apprentices or children in early career/age orientation.
- The framework offers the option to show the hazards not or wrongly as identified by the player after failing the time limit.
Next steps (among other tasks):
- Standardize a catalog of hazards with validated mitigation strategies that can be implemented and visualized within the content management of a virtual safety, health, and well-being training environment.
- Create a toolbox for standard animations and effects to work in conjunction with the meta-information to enhance certain hazard representations. For example, implementation of a simple inventory system for both personal protective equipment (PPE) and tools. Players can solve problems only if they have/wear the right tools, items, and/or PPE.
- Integrate directly into and test user experience in existing learning workflows.