  Virtual environments (VEs) are making their way into various sectors of life
to enhance and support human activity, including learning. VEs have been used
in various contexts for training, and in many cases they are designed to model
or simulate - as accurately and authentically as possible - a specific work
context. In striving for authenticity, visual and representative realism tends
to receive most of the development input, despite of several studies that
challenge its importance. New training avenues have raised the importance of
rigorous phenomenological descriptions for a deeper understanding of user
experience in the actual context of use. This paper reports the preliminary
steps in a phenomenological analysis of how employees working in actual
hazardous settings experience virtual safety training environments. Such
open-ended research project can reveal new aspects of user experience that can
advice the development and evaluation of human-computer interaction in digital
technology-enhanced training contexts.
