Safety is a critical issue for the construction industry. Literature argues that human error contributes to more than half of occupational incidents and could be directly impacted by effective training programs. This paper reviews the current safety training status in the US construction industry. Results from the review evidence the gap between the status and industry expectation on safety. To narrow this gap, this paper demonstrates the development and utilisation of a training program that is based on virtual reality (VR) simulation. The VR-based safety training program can offer a safe working environment where users can effectively rehearse tasks with electrical hazards and ultimately promote their abilities for electrical hazard cognition and intervention. Its visualisation and simulation can also remove the training barriers caused by electricity's features of invisibility and dangerousness.

Inefficient communication among project stakeholders is one of the most critical issues in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. In reality, it is difficult to create a common understanding about a project among key stakeholders located remotely. The recent progress of virtual reality (VR) makes it a promising approach for interactive visualization of design, construction, and facility management. However, the lack of interactions in VR, such as data interaction, human-building interaction, and human-human interaction, has impeded the adoption of VR in the AEC industry. To fill the gaps, this paper introduces a cloud-based multiuser VR headset system called collaborative virtual reality (CoVR) that facilitates interpersonal project communication in an interactive VR environment. CoVR provides not only a shared immersive experience, but also allows interactions with the underlying simulated world and face-to-face conversations in the virtual world. A real case was used to test the usability of the CoVR system, followed by a building inspection experiment in which 71 subjects were recruited to test the comparative advantages of CoVR. Results indicate that CoVR improves interpersonal interactions in the immersive virtual environment and enhances communications in construction projects. Users of CoVR tended to perform better in a building inspection task than those who were using a single-person VR system. In practice, CoVR is expected to help project stakeholders create a shared vision before construction work commences.

Prefabrication has been considered an effective alternative to conventional building. It has gained an increasing amount of attention over the last few decades as a way to advance sustainable construction. This study focused on the construction stage to compare sustainable performances of prefabrication with conventional building. Sixteen indicators were extracted from a literature review and specialist interviews to conduct a sustainability evaluation. A survey was delivered to developers, designers, superintendents, manufacturers, and contractors of a Chinese case project. A total of 51 valid responses were collected. Projection pursuit (PP), based on the real-coded accelerating genetic algorithm (RAGA), was employed to evaluate the sustainability of prefabrication. The results showed that there was a consensus among the participants that prefabrication has more obvious sustainable performances in the construction phase compared with conventional building. However, cognitive differences among the participants regarding the sustainability of prefabrication were also pronounced. The findings presented in this paper may assist the government to propose feasible policies and measures to promote the development of prefabrication in China.