A proposal of a site object library for construction workers' safety training using BIM-based Immersive Virtual Reality

Workforce Health and Safety (HS) training in the construction sector has recently witnessed the growing adoption of immersive Virtual Reality technologies (VR) reaping the benefits of the enhanced workers’ involvement and safety contents’ transfer of on-site training while cancelling the related risks and costs. However, despite the diffusion of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and of BIM tools for construction simulation and planning, most VR training experiences are still based on generic construction site environments and are not included in a comprehensive training program that takes into account and leverages project-specific information and contents comprised in BIM Site models. For this reason, in previous work (Getuli, Capone and Bruttini, 2020) the authors proposed a prototype implementation protocol of BIM and VR for the planning, management and administration of three typologies of VR safety training (Layout, Activity and Emergency) via a game technology-based workflow encountering in the production of the VR training experiences a limitation in the lack of a standard categorization and informative requirements definition for construction site objects. In order to address this issue, the present work proposes a BIM-based Site Object Library oriented to the production of VR safety training experiences as a result of a three-step process with the definition of: 1) Object list and categories from the analysis of construction sector’s regulations, case studies and site scenarios’ imagery; 2) Object requirements from the analysis of their real features (e.g. visual aspects, sounds, motion patterns); 3) Object Information Sheet for the inclusion of any site objects in the library. The implementation and validation of the proposed Site Object Library is currently in progress for the production of BIM-Based VR safety training experiences on a case study project and will be discussed in future works.