Development of a Virtual Environment for Safety Warnings Behavior Compliance Evaluation

The effectiveness of safety warnings is measured by user’s behavior compliance. Although compliance is an important component in determining the success of a warning, its study becomes difficult to be developed in a real situation, due to methodological, financial and ethical issues. Virtual Reality (VR) can be a solution to these limitations. VR has the advantage of offering realistic experiences that even the person not being physically present in the environment feels like being there. However, for this to happen, it is necessary to develop 3D environments and narratives involving participants as if they were real situations. Since the construction of realistic 3D environment and consistent narratives a challenge for researchers, this study aims to develop and evaluate a 3D environment with a narrative to safety warnings effectiveness studies. The first part (development of virtual environment/narrative) was done through meetings with the multidisciplinary team Ergonomics Laboratory. The aim was to define requirements for the narrative and the virtual environment design features. The second part (evaluation of the prototype), through pilot tests, results will be discussed.