Improving the hazard-identification skills of construction workers is a vital step towards preventing accidents in the increasingly complex working conditions of construction jobsites. Training the construction workforce to recognize hazards therefore plays a central role in preparing workers to actively understand safety-related risks and make assertive safety decisions. Considering the inadequacies of traditional safety-training methods (e.g., passive lectures, videos, demonstrations), researchers have employed advanced visualization techniques such as virtual reality technologies to enable users to actively improve their hazard-identification skills in a safe and controlled environment. However, current virtual reality techniques sacrifice realism and demand high computational costs to reproduce real environments. Augmented 360-degree panoramas of reality offers an innovative alternative that creates low-cost, simple-to-capture, true-to-reality representations of the actual construction jobsite within which trainees may practice identifying hazards. This proof-of-concept study developed and evaluated a platform using augmented 360-degree panoramas of reality (PARS) for safety-training applications to enhance trainees’ hazard-identification skills for four types of sample hazards. Thirty subjects participated in a usability test that evaluated the PARS training platform and its augmented 360-degree images captured from real construction jobsites. The usability reviews demonstrate that the trainees found the platform and augmentations advantageously to learning hazard identification. The results of this study will foreseeably help researchers in developing engaging training platforms to improve the hazard-identification skills of workers.

Construction site visits are interactive experiences that enhance students’ understanding of real construction practices. Site visits create an interactive learning environment for students and provide exposure to a real-world spatiotemporal experience of a construction project. This article explores construction site visit application as an educational component in construction curriculum. An online survey was conducted to assess the current status of site visit application in construction education, benefits and barriers of their implementation, and the role of virtual site visits as alternative experiences to real site visits. This study focused on university faculty members in construction programs across the United States. The results of the study show that faculty members predominantly reported to have had zero or one to two site visits for each construction core subject areas taught throughout their careers. Furthermore, respondents indicated that the benefits of observing and interacting with the environment and the professionals present in a construction site are exceptionally important for the students. The respondents also remarked that the spatiotemporal challenges of construction projects are the most significant barriers for site visits. Finally, the study also revealed that a low percentage of the faculty have had educational experiences with virtual site visits.

Safety training has a direct impact on the prevention of construction accidents, and increasingly dynamic and complex working conditions require that construction workers and professionals acquire the safety-related knowledge they need to make safety conscious decisions. Currently, virtual modeling methods—such as building information modeling (BIM)—provide the means for visualizing the associated safety conditions present during construction projects and for simulating real working environments for safety-training purposes. However, these models use unrealistic computer-generated simulations of a construction environment and therefore do not provide a full depiction of real-world environments in terms of time, physical space, and material properties. One of the emerging technologies that can address this limitation is panoramic augmented reality. In this paper, 360° panoramas are used for visualizing complex situations on real construction sites, and these panoramas can be augmented with different layers of safety-related information. Panoramic augmented reality creates highly realistic and detailed representations of real construction sites while giving users a sense of immersion. These features enable 360° panoramic augmented reality to become a strong tool for developing training materials specifically for construction safety. In such an environment, construction workers and professionals are capable of navigating within the data-rich environment of a real construction project to observe and identify the safety challenges present in various circumstances. This paper describes the technical development of a virtual safety training environment using a panoramic augmented reality technique. The process of generating the panoramic experience, the techniques for augmenting the captured panoramas with different layers of safety-related information, and the resulting safety training platform are explained in detail. Additionally, this paper presents a pilot study to illustrate the hazard identification training within the proposed platform.