Virtual Reality Based Training for Industry, a Cognitive Process Approach

Simulation and Virtual Reality (VR) have been extensively used in many industries, where the success of the initiative has been reliant on technology, training objective and correctly set expectations. Early in VR’s use, success was assured with huge budgets, for instance the military and aerospace. Later on in its use, cheap VR failed because the technology was lacking fidelity, expectations were too high and because it was mostly focused on physical skills acquisition. Where VR has a new cost effective role in today’s industry is enabled by two factors: dramatically improved price performance of the technology, and in the appropriate training objective. It is suggested in this paper that early ‘task’ focused training was an inappropriate industrial use of VR and that the best safety benefits can be obtained from individual and team based cognitive process training, experiential learning, enhanced decision making and improved communications, all learnt in carefully constructed VR scenarios. The careful selection of situations for VR reproduction are those; which do not happen frequently enough in the real world for experiential learning to occur, require adaptive decision making, benefit from shared mental models of desired outcomes being understood in teams and those that are too expensive or dangerous to replicate in any other way.