Assessing Students’ Hazard Identification Ability in Virtual Reality using Eye Tracking Devices

Researchers have applied eye-tracking to assess construction trainees' hazard-identification ability as eye movements can reveal people's mental processes. However, existing studies asked the workers to identify hazards in static pictures, which fails to capture the dynamic characteristics in the real world or risky job site. To address this limitation, this paper integrates Virtual Reality (VR) with eye-tracking to assess students' hazard-identification ability, because VR could represent the real world better than pictures. Compared to sending the trainees to the job site, it is safer and more flexible to assess the trainees' hazard identification ability in a VR environment. This study developed a VR construction site with 20 hazards, and 14 students were invited to walk around the virtual job site to identify the potential hazards. Their performance and eye-movement data were collected and analyzed to assess their hazard-identification ability. The results validated that the VR environment could provide a more comprehensive assessment of the students' hazard identification ability using the eye-tracking data.