Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment (HIRA) VR training.
Practise spotting hazards, assessing risk and selecting controls on a walk-through of a virtual plant, building the eye for hazards a checklist alone cannot teach.
Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment (HIRA) VR training
DrillXR Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment trains the single most transferable safety skill, the ability to look at a workplace and actually see its hazards, on a walk-through of a virtual plant. The simulation reproduces the failures that undermine real risk assessment: hazards that go unrecognised because they have been normalised, likelihood or severity that is underestimated, controls chosen out of hierarchy order, and residual risk that is left unmanaged after the obvious step is taken. The trainee works the HIRA procedure, walking the area and identifying the hazards present, assessing the likelihood and severity of each, ranking the risks to prioritise them, selecting controls in line with the hierarchy of control, and recording findings and assigning actions. Because hazard perception is a trained eye rather than a memorised list, the headset is built to develop that eye in a realistic, consequence-free setting.
Risk assessment is the foundation that every other control sits on, and a flawed HIRA propagates danger through everything downstream. The Factories Act 1948 places occupier duties to provide and maintain safe systems of work, which assumes hazards have been identified and assessed, a site HIRA or risk-assessment procedure formalises how that assessment is done and recorded, and the BOCW Act 1996 carries the equivalent obligation across construction sites. The common failure is not a missing form but a workforce that has stopped noticing the hazard they pass every day, or an assessor who reaches for PPE when elimination or engineering control was available. DrillXR puts the trainee into a plant seeded with real hazards and scores whether they spot them, rank them honestly and choose controls in the right order, building the discipline a blank template cannot.
Why train hazard identification & risk assessment (hira) in VR
Hazard identification is a perceptual skill, and perception is precisely what a slide deck cannot train, because a photograph of a hazard is not the same as noticing it in a busy, three-dimensional space. VR places the trainee inside a realistic plant and measures whether they actually see the trailing cable, the unguarded edge, the incompatible chemicals stored together, or whether they walk past them the way a complacent eye does. They practise assessing likelihood and severity against a live scene rather than an abstract matrix, and selecting controls in hierarchy order, elimination before engineering before administrative before PPE, with the scene showing why a higher control is better. Seeding a real working plant with hazards to test a learner is impractical and unsafe; DrillXR can place any combination of hazards and score the trainee's eye for them, which is what turns risk assessment from a paperwork exercise into a trained instinct.
Inside a hazard identification & risk assessment (hira) session
The session places the trainee at the entrance to a virtual plant area with a brief to carry out a risk assessment. They walk the area and identify the hazards present, a hazard missed reduces their score while a false alarm on a controlled item is noted; the scene is seeded with the kind of normalised hazards a familiar eye overlooks. For each hazard they assess likelihood and severity, and the simulation challenges an assessor who downplays a low-frequency, high-consequence risk. They rank the risks to prioritise the most serious, then select controls by the hierarchy, and choosing PPE where elimination or an engineering control was available is scored as a weaker answer. Finally they record their findings and assign actions with owners, completing the assessment as a usable document rather than an abandoned form. Missed hazards, mis-ranked risks and out-of-hierarchy controls all register against the result.
Scoring & certification
Each attempt is scored across the procedure: hazards identified on the walk-through, likelihood and severity assessed, risks ranked and prioritised, controls selected by the hierarchy, and findings recorded with actions assigned. The system logs the decisive lapses specifically, a missed hazard, an underestimated severity, a control chosen out of hierarchy order, residual risk left unaddressed, so an assessor sees exactly where the trainee's eye or judgement fell short. Per-step weighting produces an overall competency outcome, and a passing run issues a dated certificate against the worker's record. Results stream over xAPI and SCORM to the LMS and the DrillXR compliance dashboard, where a safety lead can confirm who is competent to author or review a HIRA, evidence assessment competence to a Factory Inspectorate, and target coaching at assessors who consistently miss a hazard class.
Deployment on your site
Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment runs on Meta Quest, Pico and PC-VR and launches in kiosk mode, booting directly into the module so a safety induction can run a queue of workers through without an instructor driving menus. The scenario is configurable to the customer's reality: the plant layout, the specific hazard set seeded into the scene, the risk matrix used by the site and the HIRA recording format can all be matched to the customer's procedure, and construction variants align with the BOCW Act obligations. Headsets are managed as a fleet from one console with completion data feeding the central dashboard. For manufacturing, construction, oil and gas and chemicals operators, this delivers consistent hazard-perception training across every site, building a workforce that sees risk before an incident exposes it.
Explore all VR safety training, see how it adapts to your industry, or read whether VR is effective for safety training.
Hazards it reproduces
- unrecognised or normalised hazards
- underestimated likelihood or severity
- controls chosen out of hierarchy order
- residual risk left unmanaged
The scored procedure
- 01Walk the area and identify the hazards
- 02Assess likelihood and severity
- 03Rank risk and prioritise
- 04Select controls by the hierarchy
- 05Record findings and assign actions
Compliance mapping
Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment (HIRA) training by industry & location
Tuned to sector hazards and local regulation. Explore the combinations most relevant to this module.
Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment (HIRA) FAQs
What does the Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment (HIRA) VR module cover?
Practise spotting hazards, assessing risk and selecting controls on a walk-through of a virtual plant, building the eye for hazards a checklist alone cannot teach.
Which hazards does it simulate?
unrecognised or normalised hazards; underestimated likelihood or severity; controls chosen out of hierarchy order; residual risk left unmanaged.
Is the hazard identification & risk assessment (hira) training assessed?
Yes. Every step is scored and timed, with pass thresholds that trigger certificates and feed the compliance dashboard.
Which standards does it map to?
Factories Act 1948 (occupier duties & safe systems of work); site HIRA / risk-assessment procedure; BOCW Act 1996 (construction risk assessment).
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