86 / 116
8 6
E L E C T R I C A L CO N N E C T I O N
S UMM E R 2 0 16
situational learning is most effective.
But in order to do this effectively,
it’s important that what a trainee
experiences is as realistic and as
close to the situation they’d find on site
as possible.
“The idea is that if you see an accident
on site, you remember it and you change
your behaviour accordingly. And so the
realism in the immersion is important if
you’re trying to change those behavioural
aspects. You need to make it feel much
more like a lived experience than simply
a realistic rendering of a detail. It’s an
amazingly compelling experience –
provided it’s as realistic as possible,”
Sidney says.
Until recently, creating avatar-like
realism within renderings required
extremely large computing facilities
and so wasn’t available to the
average PC user. But the advent of VR
technologies has seen video games
really come to the fore.
“Organisations now give this
technology away for free and you’re able
to run and create visual realism within
a laptop-level computer. And then
consider the location-based sound that’s
now possible, haptic feedback (recreating
the sense of touch by applying forces,
vibrations to the user) and the ability to
physically move through a virtual space –
all these immersive qualities are adding
to how convincing and how compelling
the virtual experience is compared to an
actual experience.”
A big draw card for the technology in
applications like white card training is its
ability to assess competencies far more
proficiently than the methods currently
being used.
“White card training is currently
assessed with a multiple choice, check-
box response to fairly obvious, contrived
scenarios. I think it’s a good example of
how little good it does to test competency
in this way.
“To have someone walk onto
a construction site and actually
identify potential hazards and so on, not
knowing what those hazards might be
to begin with, would vastly improve a
competency test. Participants would have
to forensically analyse a situation rather
than tick a box on one of five choices –
four of which are obviously false with only