Towards Design Principles for Safety Training in Virtual Reality: An Action Design Research Case

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has progressed and become viable for the purpose of education, learning, and training. Organizations adopt and employ VR technologies to enhance employees’ skills, competency, and readiness through safety training that prepare the employees towards work-specific situations that are dangerous, hazardous, and uncertain. This research in progress paper reports early results from an Action Design Research case on VR safety training. The empirical work of this study is on-going and is set in the domain of rail industry. Early results are reported as tentative design implications for safety training in VR, which are based on a first round of data analysis. The implications are proposed with the ambition of extending them into design principles for safety training in VR. Subsequently, steps for future research are outlined and discussed to advance the design implications into principles.