Virtual Forests, Real Skills: Assessing the QoE of VR-based Occupational Training and its Impact on Experience and Learning Outcomes

Virtual Reality (VR) promises to benefit training and education by offering ubiquitous risk-free access to hands-on experiential learning. This paper presents an evaluation of a VR-based occupational safety training application for forestry work, assessing the VR system's impact on training effectiveness, including skill transfer to real world settings. 73 participants experienced two learning scenarios covering different task types and settings. They were either assigned to the VR training or relied on traditional forestry training materials only. Our results confirm the positive effects of VR-based training on participants' experience as well as successful skill transfer to real-world challenges, as evidenced by participant feedback on a broad range of experience measures. In addition, our study extends existing work by examining how varying VR training quality affects both subjective experience and objective performance outcomes in terms of learning transfer. Our findings indicate that better technical quality of the VR training indeed can translate to significantly improved performance during skill application in subsequent test situations. Surprisingly, we could not detect a similarly pronounced effect when analyzing participants' subjective experience ratings. We reflect on these findings and discuss methodological implications for experience assessment in the context of VR-based training and education.