In this interview, Professor Alessandro Innocenti, director of the VRLab of Santa Chiara from the University of Siena, discusses the role of virtual reality as an experimental environment for studying human behaviour and improving workplace training. Drawing on his experience in experimental economics and VR-based safety simulations, he highlights how immersive technologies can enhance learning, monitor workers’ ergonomics, and support safer and more effective industrial training.
The video interview was carried out by Santa Chiara FabLab from the University of Siena. Below the video, the full transcript is given.
Interviewer: Good morning everyone. Today we are here with Alessandro Innocenti, Professor of Economic Policy at the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Siena, coordinator of the LabSi Experimental Economics Laboratory and coordinator of LabVR, the Virtual Reality Laboratory of the Santa Chiara Lab. Good morning, Professor, and thank you again for accepting our invitation.
Prof. Innocenti:Good morning, thank you.
Interviewer: To begin with, could you explain what you work on and what your research interests are?
Prof. Innocenti: Certainly. I am an economist, and I came to work on virtual reality at this stage of my career starting from experimental economics.
For me, virtual reality is first and foremost an environment for experimental research: a space in which it is possible to study how behaviours — not only economic ones, but human behaviours more generally — can be explored and analysed through research. It is a digital and virtual environment, but also an isolated one, in which I started — from the moment I began working in this field — the laboratory and my activities related to virtual reality.
I have often said that virtual reality resembles a kind of “vacuum laboratory” for the social and human sciences.
By “vacuum” I mean that in the STEM sciences (Ed. Note: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) experimental research is conducted in environments that are isolated from the external world.
In research on human behaviour, however, it is not possible to isolate the subject from external determinants. I am referring to the influence of context, which in experiments often escapes the analysis of the experimenter, who tends to focus mainly on the content of the experimental design.
I say this because I originally came from experimental economics, where we used to submit experimental designs to young students.
For me, virtual reality has primarily represented the environment in which I conduct experimental research. Then everything else followed, and this naturally leads me to talk about the work you are doing within the EMPAIRED project.
Interviewer: Today we are here to talk with you about the EMPAIRED project, a project that we coordinate and are developing together with two other partners: Moebius and Deep Reality. EMPAIRED is one of the projects selected in the second Open Call of Master XR, a European project that promotes the adoption of extended reality technologies in industrial training and manufacturing robotics through an open and collaborative platform.
More specifically, the EMPAIRED project aims to develop an empathetic ecosystem based on the integration of virtual reality and supported by a virtual assistant called Algho, while the ErgonXR platform — developed during the first Open Call of the Master XR project — focuses on the real-time monitoring of physical ergonomics data.
We will now show you a very short video of the scenario we are currently developing.
video demo
After watching the demo of the EMPAIRED project, what do you think could be the potential benefits and possible limitations of using VR and XR technologies for training in industrial contexts?
Prof. Innocenti: So, Ergon is a project that I found very interesting from the very first moment you told me about it. You should know that I have been working on workplace safety in virtual reality since 2016, and, together with the laboratory, we have developed many virtual reality simulations to train workers on workplace safety procedures.
This has naturally led us to deal not only with the physical risks related to the production process, but also with the risks related to the condition of being a worker; therefore, the correct ergonomic posture of the worker is also part of our research activity. A possibility like this — that is, studying the ergonomic posture of the worker — is fundamental for teaching workers how to avoid problems related to their safety and health.
In these months, we are also carrying out a project in which we have addressed the issue of workers’ health and safety in the long term. It is a project concerning the tanning industry in Tuscany, but it naturally also relates to other production hubs in Italy. In tanneries — just as in the simulations we carried out for INAIL on marble quarries, or for Rubes Triva on urban public services — there are risks connected to the way workers position themselves during their daily activities, which concerns the ergonomic balance of their operations.
It is difficult to study the entire posture of the body in virtual reality unless one resorts — as happens in ErgonXR — to sensors that make it possible to represent posture in real time and continuously. This is a very useful possibility in our field, which is workplace safety, and more generally concerns the overall health of workers, including their long-term health.
Just to give an example: only a few months ago, we completed a two-year project with INAIL on workers in open-pit quarries, which is a very dangerous sector where, unfortunately, every year there are fatalities during work activities. For this reason, most of our simulations — we developed four of them, which were produced and distributed by INAIL — focus precisely on the risks that workers face directly in quarries while performing their operations.
Being able — despite the current limitations, but also thanks to the type of project you are developing — to associate each simulation with a precise measurement of how the worker, while simulating their activity in virtual reality, moves correctly or incorrectly with respect to their physical and ergonomic balance is absolutely essential.
Those who collaborate with us — including INAIL, the Association of Tanners, the Rubes Triva Foundation, and groups dealing for example with urban public services, such as the HERA Group in Bologna, the ALIA Group in Florence, and the AMA Group in Rome — are very interested not only in preventing accidents that typically occur in the activities of those working in public services, but also in teaching workers how to avoid long-term damage to their physical structure. This is precisely what the application you are developing aims to address.
For this reason, I believe that it is not only very useful for those of us who work in this field as providers of simulations and services, but it is also something that is increasingly requested by our clients, who ask us more and more often to deal with the ergonomic health of their workers.
I therefore see a lot of potential in this approach, and I believe it is a direction that will attract considerable attention and interest from companies, not only from institutions dealing with health and safety, but also from those responsible for managing production processes, plants, and machinery used by workers, including the manual use of tools and equipment.
Interviewer: Thank you very much. Based on your experience, what strategies do you think could be effective for assessing whether learning in virtual environments actually corresponds to real learning in a factory or in the workplace?
Prof. Innocenti: This is the most important question for anyone working with virtual reality: how meaningful is it to work on virtual processes simulated through a headset? As you know, in the Santa Chiara Lab, we also have the CAVE (Ed. Note: Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, an immersive room in which 3D images generated by a computer are projected onto the walls, allowing experimental simulations of social interactions and economic, psychological, and social behaviours). But the key point remains the same: how realistic and how useful, in the end, is the worker’s learning experience?
This is the question from which I started in my activity about ten years ago — since the laboratory was opened — and from the beginning, I became convinced, on the basis of the research I consulted and contributed to, that virtual reality represents an essential tool for learning.
Not only for the reason that everyone already knows and that is most commonly mentioned — namely the fact that one can have direct experience of the production process involved, which means experiential learning — but also because the strength of a so-called “experimental” environment lies in the fact that it is isolated from all those elements that might accidentally or indirectly influence the behaviour of the worker, either by correcting it or simply by monitoring and analysing it. In virtual reality, these elements can be excluded.
This characteristic of virtual reality is what I call “effective substitution of the senses.” A large part of our brain processes are automatic, particularly those related to emotions. In the field of workplace safety, this mainly concerns fear and the perception of risk, which activate a series of automatic and spontaneous reactions. These are responses that the brain triggers without the need for conscious control.
For this reason, I use the term “processes without introspective access.” If someone is afraid of something, it is not necessary for them to be consciously aware of that fear in order for it to produce its effects.
The same mechanism also applies in virtual reality: when we expose a subject wearing a headset to a virtual environment, we can be confident that their senses will react autonomously to that environment thanks to the so-called sense of presence generated inside the headset.
This cognitive illusion is the basis of virtual reality’s ability to function as a highly effective learning environment, both for teaching and for learning, and also for correcting behaviours that may be dangerous from the point of view of safety or harmful to the worker’s health.
I began working with virtual reality at a time when it was mostly discussed as a gaming tool. Even today, this is still the main message coming from the major virtual reality producers — not only Meta, but also Apple, HTC Vive, and others.
However, I believe that after this rather long phase — it has been at least six or seven years since all-in-one VR headsets, that is, headsets that are independent from the computer, have become easily portable and relatively inexpensive — other fields of application will increasingly emerge. The price of headsets, in fact, has gone from thousands of euros to just a few hundred.
For this reason, I think that the real strength of VR will emerge precisely in those contexts that until now have mainly been studied within universities, but that are now becoming an increasingly common part of training and, more generally, of business activities.
I would also like to add that, by attending conferences and fairs dedicated to virtual reality across Europe, I have observed that in many European countries — especially Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and also France and Spain — it is no longer only large companies that adopt internal training programs using virtual reality for new employees.
These environments are often referred to as clean rooms (Ed. Note: controlled-contamination environments). In these settings, the company’s developers build a virtual environment in which all the production processes of the company can be learned and practiced in virtual reality.
You can easily understand how significant this change is: we move from a situation in which new employees were trained using real equipment — with all the risks involved in operating machinery and performing expensive and potentially dangerous processes — to a situation in which this training can take place through virtual reality, without time constraints and without risk.
And this is the most important challenge that we are also working on, and that you are working on as well with this project.
Interviewer: Thank you very much. With this question, our interview comes to an end, and we would like to thank you once again for the time you dedicated to us and for your valuable contribution.
Prof. Innocenti: Thank you, and best of luck with your work.
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