User-centred design of a grid health virtual reality tabletop for energy networks

Applications of Virtual Reality (VR) in the energy sector to date have been largely limited to safety critical training applications. In this paper, we present Grid Health VR: a platform for understanding and interrogating the operational health of a given network sector, and enabling shared sense-making and understanding of network operations with the wider community. We detail how a co-design process can be operationalised to ensure the software platform responds directly to genuine network challenges and needs. Grid Health VR represents an important proof of concept for how applications of VR in the energy sector may be fruitfully expanded far beyond current uses in training and health/safety applications.