Construction Research Centre, National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
UKAEA, Culham Science Centre, Abingdon, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2021 Mar 24;16(3):e0248225. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248225. eCollection 2021.
Virtual reality (VR) can create safe, cost-effective, and engaging learning environments. It is commonly assumed that improvements in simulation fidelity lead to better learning outcomes. Some aspects of real environments, for example vestibular or haptic cues, are difficult to recreate in VR, but VR offers a wealth of opportunities to provide additional sensory cues in arbitrary modalities that provide task relevant information. The aim of this study was to investigate whether these cues improve user experience and learning outcomes, and, specifically, whether learning using augmented sensory cues translates into performance improvements in real environments. Participants were randomly allocated into three matched groups: Group 1 (control) was asked to perform a real tyre change only. The remaining two groups were trained in VR before performance was evaluated on the same, real tyre change task. Group 2 was trained using a conventional VR system, while Group 3 was trained in VR with augmented, task relevant, multisensory cues. Objective performance, time to completion and error number, subjective ratings of presence, perceived workload, and discomfort were recorded. The results show that both VR training paradigms improved performance for the real task. Providing additional, task-relevant cues during VR training resulted in higher objective performance during the real task. We propose a novel method to quantify the relative performance gains between training paradigms that estimates the relative gain in terms of training time. Systematic differences in subjective ratings that show comparable workload ratings, higher presence ratings and lower discomfort ratings, mirroring objective performance measures, were also observed. These findings further support the use of augmented multisensory cues in VR environments as an efficient method to enhance performance, user experience and, critically, the transfer of training from virtual to real environment scenarios.
虚拟现实 (VR) 可以创建安全、经济高效且引人入胜的学习环境。人们普遍认为，模拟逼真度的提高会带来更好的学习效果。真实环境的某些方面，例如前庭或触觉提示，很难在 VR 中重现，但 VR 提供了丰富的机会，可以提供任意模态的额外感官提示，提供与任务相关的信息。本研究旨在探讨这些提示是否能提高用户体验和学习效果，特别是使用增强感官提示进行学习是否能转化为真实环境中的表现提升。参与者被随机分配到三个匹配的组：第 1 组（对照组）仅被要求进行真实的轮胎更换。其余两组在 VR 中进行培训，然后在相同的真实轮胎更换任务上评估他们的表现。第 2 组使用传统的 VR 系统进行培训，而第 3 组则在具有增强的、与任务相关的多感官提示的 VR 中进行培训。记录了客观表现、完成时间和错误数量、存在感、感知工作负荷和不适的主观评分。结果表明，两种 VR 培训模式都提高了真实任务的表现。在 VR 培训中提供额外的、与任务相关的提示，会导致在真实任务中的表现更高。我们提出了一种新的方法来量化培训模式之间的相对绩效增益，该方法根据培训时间来估计相对增益。还观察到主观评分的系统差异，这些差异显示出可比的工作负荷评分、更高的存在感评分和更低的不适感评分，与客观表现衡量标准相匹配。这些发现进一步支持在 VR 环境中使用增强型多感官提示作为提高性能、用户体验以及关键的从虚拟环境到真实环境场景的培训转移的有效方法。
