Project Summary/Abstract
Public Health Laboratories (PHLs) play a crucial role in the detection, prevention, and control of disease
through surveillance, diagnostic and reference testing, and emergency response support. To provide these
services, PHLs require a highly skilled and well-trained workforce of laboratory professionals. Despite this,
training and education represent laboratories’ lowest average budgetary expenditures. Further, there is little
capacity to provide laboratory safety training in many State PHLs. To address the shortage of PHL training
opportunities, there is a need for low-cost, accessible alternatives to current training, which currently requires
substantial time and monetary investment (e.g., travel and registration for external meetings, seminars, and
workshops) or fails to provide realistic training (e.g., classroom- and web-based training).
To address these challenges, Charles River Analytics and our collaborator, Dr. Michael Pentella, propose to
design and evaluate Virtual Reality (VR) Immersive and Realistic Training to Understand and Address Laboratory
Competencies (VIRTUAL-C), an immersive VR environment that provides laboratory biosafety training. The
VIRTUAL-C system will leverage the simulation developer toolkit from our successful VIRTUOSO effort.
Developed for the Army Research Laboratory, VIRTUOSO provides a flexible framework for the rapid
development of virtual environments (VEs). VIRTUOSO supports natural gross- and fine-motor interactions in
the VE, strengthening the ability to train psychomotor skills in a simulation. Our extension of this framework to
the PHL domain under VIRTUAL-C includes development of a library of virtual assets and reusable scripts and
support for natural interactions specific to PHL training needs in the VE.
The successful completion of VIRTUAL-C will directly improve PHL training opportunities by providing a
framework for developing and providing immersive VR training modules to laboratory personnel. Immersive,
competency-based VR training will benefit laboratory professionals by accelerating the training process and
supporting the development and maintenance of personnel knowledge, skills, and abilities. Recent advances in
the VR hardware market also make VR a potentially low-cost training medium that provides a level of realism
often not realized in traditional training methods, such as classroom- and web-based training. Furthermore, VR
enables the training of potentially hazardous laboratory tasks (e.g., testing a specimen from a patient with
tuberculosis) in a controlled, risk-free environment. Finally, technology developed under the VIRTUAL-C effort
can be extended to address additional training needs (e.g., guided instruction of standard operation procedures
(SOPs, operation of laboratory equipment) and to other laboratory settings (e.g., environmental, agricultural,
clinical, university).
