The student, Shiva Pedram, has already worked with up to 400 miners who have used Coal Services’ four virtual reality facilities in New South Wales.

The university said her research would provide a better understanding of the gaps between training needs and simulation capabilities.

While the double fatality wall collapse incident at the Austar longwall mine mired the state’s safety statistics last year, the university said the number of underground coal mine injuries resulting in lost time had dropped by almost one third since 2009-10.

“The training offered by Coal Services has contributed significantly to this positive outcome,” Pedram said.

“The training system gives employees the confidence to do their job well and the confidence to be able to handle situations when things go wrong. It’s a particularly acute problem for highly skilled rescue brigades whose individual and collective proficiency relies upon the ability of their training program to deliver scenarios that are as realistic as possible.”

Evidently the PhD student is confident that the virtual reality training delivers strong safety outcomes as she has started a crowdfunding campaign on website Pozible to help spread the tech to other industries.

“There are a variety of other high risk industries, such as aviation and rail transport, where workers are at risk of injury,” Pedram said on the site.

“Therefore, we aim to improve their training through implementing virtual reality based training inspired by what Coal Services has achieved so far.”

She said funds will be used to organise a few trips to meet with the Railways Authority and to start developing a project prototype.

“Developing the initial scenarios which will cost approximately $2000 to pay programmers at university of Wollongong to code the scenarios,” she said.