Investigation of the awareness and attitude towards virtual reality (VR) based training and its impacts on long-term retention of knowledge of health and safety training in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The aim of this research is to evaluate the applications of VR based training for health and safety in Saudi Arabia. The following study will start by providing an overview about previous studies on VR-training applications in different sectors. It will also present the potential positive impact of VR based training system on uptake of knowledge of trainees who could improve their health and safety knowledge and skills through the optimal use of VR-based training. Recently, Saudi government and some leader companies have paid an attention to improve health and safety training sector such as using VR based training. However, there is lack of study that clarify the level of VR applications for health and safety training and its challenges to apply in Saudi Arabia. in order to solve this issue, it has been conducted a survey with 84 Saudi employees who work in the private sector and semi structured interviews with six Saudi experts in the field of health and safety. Then it has been analyzed the finding by different human evaluation method such as descriptive and statistical analysis for questionnaires result and thematic analysis for interviews result. After that, it has been used SWOT analysis in order to discuss and evaluate the current situation of VR based training in Saudi Arabia and ISM to prioritize the most important factors of the VR based training in Saudi Arabia and to define factors’ dependencies among each other. Finally, according to the fining of this study, it has been found that it seems there is a lack of awareness about VR applications which come because of the poor quality and lack of use of training programs based on VR.