The Value of Immersion in Co-Present, Collaborative Safety Review

Young professionals are taught and trained in many ways; educators are continually seeking better ways to deliver engaging and relevant content. No exception is the field of Building and Construction, where undergraduate education faces a gap between classroom and practice. In this paper we describe an ongoing multidisciplinary collaboration focused on using Virtual and Augmented Reality to provide authentic educational experiences. Specifically, we created several cross-platform lab exercises that take students into dangerous construction situations where they must identify a number of safety violations. The students rotated through several visualization venues, each with different levels of immersion: from a laptop to a projector to a CAVE with 3 walls and a floor. Subjective survey data from the students indicates a significant positive effect of larger, interactive immersive displays.