The gas alarm sounds in a processing plant. Within seconds, a handful of people need to do different jobs, and every one of them depends on what the others say. Someone isolates the area. Someone calls it in. Someone grabs the first aid kit, and someone checks the headcount at the muster point. That kind of coordination is both hard and expensive to rehearse safely, which is exactly the gap that multi-user VR training fills. It puts a whole team inside the same simulated emergency, so they can practise talking and coordinating together.
Much of today’s VR training is built for one person at a time. That works well for learning a procedure. But real emergencies are rarely solo efforts. The skills that matter most, like clear handovers and calm communication, only develop when people practise them with each other.
Here’s how team-based VR works, and where it makes the biggest difference.
What Is Multi-User VR Training?
Multi-user VR training lets several people share the same virtual scenario at the same time, each playing their own role. They can see each other’s avatars, talk over voice, pass equipment and react to the same events as they unfold.
Teams don’t have to be in the same room. Some sessions run with everyone in one training space, while others connect people across different sites. The best platforms also bring in people who aren’t wearing a headset, such as supervisors following along on a shared screen. Viewport XR’s SASHIMI platform was built around exactly that idea.
Some teams go a step further and train in mixed reality. Researchers have found that mixed reality lets responders coordinate face to face in real time, while the emergency itself is added digitally around them.
Why Is Virtual Reality Emergency Training Done in Teams?
Because emergency response is a team activity, and the law treats it that way. Regulation 43 of the model Work Health and Safety Regulations sets out what an emergency plan must contain. As guidance from Safe Work Australia explains, that includes effective communication between whoever coordinates the response and everyone at the workplace. The plan must also include how emergency procedures are tested, and how often.
Live drills remain essential, but they’re disruptive. Shutting down a site for an evacuation exercise costs production time. And some scenarios simply can’t be staged for real, such as a fire in a confined space or a chemical release.
Virtual reality emergency training fills that gap. Teams can rehearse scenarios too dangerous to recreate physically. They can also repeat them as often as they need without stopping operations. Real drills then become a chance to confirm skills rather than build them from scratch.
It also helps teams practise the handovers that live drills rarely reach. A site’s emergency response team can rehearse briefing the fire brigade or ambulance crew when they arrive. A 2025 review of immersive training in fire and rescue services found the field moving towards exactly this. It describes growing emphasis on collaborative work across disciplines and jurisdictions.
How Does Collaborative VR Training Work?
Collaborative VR training follows the same rhythm as good live simulation, and the debrief at the end matters as much as the scenario itself.
During the scenario, each trainee takes a role, such as incident controller or area warden. The facilitator can trigger new events as the session runs, like a second casualty or a blocked exit. Teams have to adapt instead of following a script, just as they would on the day. Because everything happens in software, the session can be recorded and replayed in the debrief, showing exactly who said what and when. Few live drills can offer that level of detail.
AI is starting to change the facilitator’s job too. The same fire and rescue review points to AI-generated scenarios as an emerging trend. Some simulators are also adding voice recognition, so trainees can speak to the system as they would on a real radio.
Not every role needs a real person. AI-driven characters can play patients or missing teammates, which makes it easier to run a session when the full team isn’t available. We look at how this works in more detail in our article on AI avatars in immersive training.
What Does Multi-User VR Training Look Like in Practice?
SASHIMI shows how this works when a team shares the same physical room. The name stands for Spatial Augmented System for Hands-on Immersive Multi-user Interaction, and we’ve been developing it for more than five years.
Instead of shutting people off from each other, SASHIMI uses pass-through, so trainees wearing headsets can still see their colleagues and the room around them. A shared hologram, such as a pump station or a haul truck, sits in the space between them. Everyone sees the same model change in real time, so the team can pass virtual objects to each other and start equipment together.
There are no controllers to learn. Hand and finger tracking lets trainees grab and point at things as they would in real life. That keeps the focus on the task and the conversation. Individual objects can carry extra information, like an audio explanation or a short video. A trainee can tap a valve to hear why it matters.
People outside the headsets aren’t left out either. A broadcast kit and companion iOS app combine the trainees and the holograms into a single video feed for any screen. Onlookers can talk to the team and guide them as they work. That makes it easy for a supervisor to coach from the side during multi-user VR training.
SASHIMI’s best-known moment came at the Resources Technology Showcase in Perth. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese put on a headset to try Mini Mine, an experience we built for Hancock Iron Ore. It turns the mining cycle into nine mini games. Through SASHIMI’s broadcast feed, the audience followed his every move live on a screen six metres wide. Watching the Prime Minister playing our VR Mini Mine turned one person’s session into something the whole room shared. In collaborative VR training, the same feature lets a full crew watch and learn from one team’s run.
Facilitators set each session up from an iPad. The simulation can shrink to fit a table for a close review, or expand to fill a large hall. Its speed and difficulty can be adjusted for anyone from apprentices to senior engineers. It can run on its own or connect securely to a learning management system. Rio Tinto has used SASHIMI at international expos, and the Royal Flying Doctor Service has used it for community engagement.
What Does the Research Say About Team-Based VR Simulation?
The evidence for team-based VR simulation is still growing, but it’s encouraging.
In a randomised controlled trial at the National University of Singapore, 120 medical and nursing students trained in mixed teams of four on nurse-physician communication. Half trained in virtual reality and half in live simulations, with 3 hours of team training each. The VR group performed no worse than the live group, supporting VR as a substitute for conventional simulation in communication team training. The researchers also suggested that AI could eventually replace costly human-controlled facilitators, making team training easier to scale.
Other researchers have built immersive multi-user emergency scenarios for medical teams. These were led by instructors trained in crew resource management, the teamwork approach that grew out of aviation. The programs kept the familiar pattern of a briefing before and a debrief after. That suggests VR fits into existing training methods rather than replacing them.
The honest caveat is that much of this research involves students and short sessions. Organisations should measure results in their own workforce before scaling up.
Where Does Multiplayer VR Training Make the Biggest Difference?
Multiplayer VR training earns its keep wherever outcomes depend on several people coordinating under pressure.
Site Emergencies and Evacuations
On mine sites and processing plants, everyone needs to know the muster points and evacuation routes. Our VR mining training is designed to build emergency response muscle memory through repeated, risk-free practice. Bringing several crew members into the same scenario adds the part an individual module can’t teach: working it out together.
Healthcare Teams Under Pressure
In hospitals, communication can decide how a situation ends. Western Health worked with us to build Reframe Your Response, a VR de-escalation training simulator for a workforce of around 11,000 staff. Western Health reported a 44% reduction in overall work health and safety incidents. Extending scenarios like these to teams lets staff rehearse who steps in and who calls for help.
Remote and Dispersed Crews
FIFO rosters and multiple sites make it hard to get a whole team in one room. Multi-user VR training lets a supervisor in Perth run a scenario with crews on different sites. The team trains together even when they don’t work side by side every day.
What Should You Plan For Before Rolling It Out?
A few practical decisions shape whether multi-user VR training works.
Start with roles and outcomes. Decide what each person must do and say in the scenario, and what good communication looks like, before anything is built. That’s what makes the debrief meaningful.
Build in some friction on purpose. Real emergencies come with noise and missing information. Good scenarios add a little of that pressure, like a radio call that cuts out or a teammate who’s late to the muster point. Teams then practise closing the loop, repeating instructions back and confirming when a task is done. That habit is one of the most valuable things team training can build.
Then think about measurement. Our virtual reality training programs use backend analytics to track performance and identify knowledge gaps. That matters even more when you need to see how a whole team performed.
Hardware and networks need planning too. Every headset in a session needs a stable, low-latency connection, because delays let gestures fall out of step with speech. One 2026 study paired multi-user VR with large language models to train operating theatre teams. It kept average round-trip latency to 75 milliseconds, which its authors judged within accepted limits for real-time team interaction. Device management also changes over time. We build on standalone headsets such as Meta Quest 3 and can supply the headsets and charging docks as a turnkey package. Meta, for example, stopped selling its commercial Quest models and business management services in February 2026. Support for Quest 3 and 3S continues until 2030. Building training that can move between headsets protects your investment. So does a modular build, because when site rules or equipment change, the digital assets can be updated without rebuilding the whole simulation.
And keep a person in the loop. A skilled facilitator who can pause the scenario and lead the debrief is often what turns a good simulation into lasting behaviour change.
Is Multi-User VR Training Right for Your Team?
If your people need to communicate clearly when things go wrong, multi-user VR training is worth serious consideration. It lets teams rehearse the moments that matter most, safely and as often as they need.
The technology has caught up. What makes the difference is designing scenarios around how your teams actually work. Our VR mining induction for Rio Tinto at Parker Point was built on SASHIMI. It replaced site tours of up to six hours with a 30-minute session. That’s the kind of practical result team training can build on.
Talk to our team about adding multi-user scenarios to your VR safety training, built around your own emergency procedures.
FAQ
Yes. Sessions can run with everyone in the same room or with trainees connecting from different sites. Some platforms also let people join on a mobile device or watch on a shared screen, so not everyone needs a headset.
No. Workplaces still need to test their emergency procedures as their emergency plan requires. VR adds extra practice between drills, including scenarios too dangerous to stage for real, so live drills become a chance to confirm skills.
It helps. Most published programs use an instructor to brief the team and lead the debrief afterwards. AI-driven characters and automated feedback can reduce the load, but a skilled facilitator is still the best way to turn a session into lasting behaviour change.
Each active trainee usually needs a standalone headset, with a reliable network connecting them. Observers and facilitators can often follow along on a laptop, tablet or large screen.
It depends on the platform and the network. Most workplace scenarios are built for small teams that mirror real roles, such as an incident controller and a few responders. Some emergency services platforms support much larger exercises that bring several agencies together.
Usually, yes. Every interaction has to stay in sync across several headsets, which adds development and testing time. The cost per learner falls as more people use it, though. PwC found VR training reached cost parity with classroom training at 375 learners.