Application of Virtual Reality to Instructions of Manual Lifting Analysis

Application of virtual and augmented reality has been popular in various areas such as education, entertainment, training, communication, design, therapy, and more. In education, particularly, virtual reality (VR) has been widely used by researchers or educators to create interactive instructions for interesting problem in alternatively real-like environments. Educators have recognized the potentials of VR to educational instructions in traditional classrooms where the environment of instructions would be limited to two-dimensional space and third-person’s view to a problem. Application of VR can allow students to be placed themselves into a virtual environment of interest with more immersive perception of problem conditions and application of instructions. In the literature, a considerable number of studies have applied digitalization technologies including virtual and augmented reality in design of process of workstations, manufacturing workplaces, and maintenance activities. In general, most of studies evaluated potentials of application of virtual reality from the perspective of fidelity, usability, and cost, but not from the perspective of effectiveness of instructions. In traditional instructions of manual lifting analysis, workplace or task conditions for manual lifting are usually given by statements, sometimes with pictorial descriptions. From the perspective of learners who need to investigate and analyze lifting tasks, it would be necessary to convert two-dimensional descriptions of task conditions into three-dimensional spaces for better understanding of tasks. However, the conversion would be limited with individual’s capability of imaginary perception. Providing virtual task environment for lifting task conditions to learners would be very helpful to understand underlying conditions for lifting task. The objective of this study was to design a teaching aid to improve instructions in virtual reality environments and to compare effectiveness of instructions between traditional instructions and virtual reality instructions. One exemplary lifting task published by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was designed by using the Unity software. This example may be used by other educators to develop their own virtual instructions for different task analyses.