Potential of an Interactive Metaverse Platform for Safety Education in Construction

The construction industry is considered the most hazardous industry globally. Therefore, safety education is crucial for raising the safety awareness of construction workers working at construction sites and creating a safe working environment. However, the current safety education method and tools cannot provide trainees with realistic and practical experiences that might help better safety awareness in practice. A metaverse, a real-time network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection, was created for more interactive communication, collaboration, and coordination between users. Several previous studies have noted that the metaverse has excellent potential for improved safety education performance, but its required functions and practical applications have not been thoroughly researched. In order to fill the research gap, this paper reviewed the potential benefits of a metaverse based on the current research and suggested its application for safety education purposes. This paper scrutinized the metaverse's key functions, particularly its information and knowledge sharing function and reality capture function. Then, the authors created a metaverse prototype based on the two key functions described above. The main contribution of this paper is reviewing the potential benefits of a metaverse for safety education. A realistic and feasible metaverse platform should be developed in future studies, and its impact on safety education should be quantitatively verified.