The main goal of Virtual Training Environments (VTEs) is to maximize training effectiveness, which can be achieved by increasing the degree of immersion. While prior work mainly focused on the visual, auditory, and navigational aspects of immersion, proprioceptive aspects may be particularly important. In this work-in-progress paper, we explore this potential by implementing an industrial VTE, which can be interacted with, using VR gloves and a tracked real tool. Further, we evaluate the VTE in a pilot study with industry apprentices, providing initial evidence that participants experienced high presence and low task load, while being generally satisfied with the training.

Visual realism in Virtual Reality (VR) increases both immersion and development costs. Consequently, it is important to understand the cost-benefit trade-off of specific aspects of visual realism. Determining the extent of visual realism often leads to decisions on the level of visual complexity of a Virtual Environment (VE). In this paper, we investigate the impact of visual complexity on a user's spatial orientation through a user study. To do so, we created a VE containing parts of a real-world place. Participants were asked to map their location within the VE to the corresponding real-world location. They were provided by a pop-up map of the entire VE, on which they were required to choose one named location out of a predefined set of locations. We manipulated the VE's visual complexity by varying the visual elements used to provide cartographic information, namely a map overlay and 3D blocks as buildings. This results in four scene types: i) landscape contour, ii) landscape contour with 3D buildings, iii) landscape contour overlaid with a map, and iv) landscape contour with both 3D buildings and the map overlay. Each participant performed our location recall task for each scene type. Our findings provide empirical evidence that addition of each of these two visual elements individually improved spatial orientation, while their combination only adds a slight improvement.

One of the main characteristics of virtual reality (VR) is immersion, which leads to comprehensive illusions of reality. Accordingly, VR is used in many applications like entertainment, marketing, and training. Especially in training applications, the effect of immersion on training success is still not entirely clear, since too much immersion may cause side effects such as users experiencing high mental demand whereas too little may disturb users’ well-being. To further investigate the matter, we developed two virtual training environments, wherein users train a typical industrial assembly task either in low or high immersive VR. In a controlled pilot study, we additionally introduced a third condition, the control group, which justifies the necessity of the training. Immediately after the VR training session, each participant completed the corresponding real assembly task in which their performance was measured. Preliminary results from our pilot study show that participants trained in high immersive VR performed better, while negative side effects could not be detected.