# Immersive Safe Oceans Technology: Developing Virtual Onboard Training Episodes for Maritime Safety
## 7 Discussion and Conclusions  
The paper presented four training episodes developed for maritime safety training and our Immersive Safe Oceans Technology. Emphasis was given to the concept of a portable training system which should be cost effective and able to be used in onboard training centers or even office environments. The technology and the developed training episodes are now at the testing phase and several research activities are planned such as usability tests, user and game experience evaluations, and finally effectiveness studies. It must be noted that just four training sections have been introduced in this paper.  
For commercial use, a wide range of training sections (with various episodes) either as individual training scenarios or as continuous episodes as part of a training curriculum/program are needed. The future of maritime training with the help of VR training moves on board, far from the physical training centers that require time and expensive training periods. The training episodes presented in this paper attempted to address the critical maritime training challenges and contribute to the effective training standardization of the maritime industry.  
Immersive Safe Oceans Technology is still at its very early stages, while our focus has so far been on learning episode pilots and not yet on the backend system development. Significant advances have been designed and expected to be implemented on both the hardware and software level, aligned with the VR technologies progression but also with the maritime sector maturity to adopt VR education especially on safety issues.  
Hardware wise, Immersive Safe Oceans Technology intends to integrate one of the most promising new VR technologies, namely, Vario's VR-2 glasses with high resolution (over 60 pixels per degree) [31].  
Figure 9: Number of marine incidents in 2019.  
We have already made small prototype versions of MarSEVR and ShipSEVR training episodes for the Varjo's VR-1 glasses with promising results. In MarSEVR, these glasses already showed its potential to show small detailed objects such as a fishing boat far in the horizon. In ShipSEVR, in turn, the VR-1 glasses improved significantly the readability of technical diagrams and documentation for the trainee's eyes. Based on these tests, it seems that this type of glasses can offer opportunities to focus on solutions where detailed textual or other visual information is a crucial part of learning aspects in maritime education. Software wise, Immersive Safe Ocean Technology will expand its safety training episodes beyond these examples (four presented training episodes) to cover hundreds of critical safety cases related with different processes inside a ship where continuous training onboard and adhere is expected to be repeated to all seaferers.  
The continuous changes on the crew and the fast operations cycle does not allow time for effective safety training prior boarding. Immersive Safe Ocean Technology will primarily operate as an onboard safety training virtual classroom assuring optimal training to all, anytime and anywhere. The approach presented in this paper can be scaled to other fields and industries.  
The authors collaborated on all sections of the paper and all authors participated in all writing and revising. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This work was supported by Business Finland (Diary number 1971/31/2018), European Regional Development Fund (Project code A73085), European Social Fund (Project code S21413), Turku University of Applied Sciences, and industrial partners.  
The authors would like to thank everyone who have participated in the development of the introduced training episodes. Their contributions provided the authors valuable information on the design the Immersive Safe Oceans Technology and help them apply it in various maritime safety scenarios.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.