The impact of immersion level and virtual reality experience on outcomes from navigating in a virtual environment

Navigating a virtual environment (VE), while maintaining situational awareness, and learning the environment are important in military training. As head mounted displays (HMDs) and virtual reality (VR) become more prevalent in military training, it is important to investigate outcomes with different levels of immersive technologies and experience with VR. We conducted a within-subjects experiment (61 participants returned for all sessions), which measured self-reported VR experience and varied level of immersion (high, Oculus HMD; medium, NVIS HMD; low, Monitor) during VE navigation. After a task to find target objects, participants engaged in transfer tasks to determine what they learned from the VE. These tasks examined if items from the environment were recognized (yes/no and multiple choice identification), or generated from memory without cues, which suggests deeper processing (recall of target/non-target items). Level of immersion impacted recognition without interacting with previous VR experience, with high immersion performing significantly better than medium and low. Immersion impacted recall of target objects, with high recalling significantly more than medium. For incidental (non-target) recall, immersion did not have an impact, but previous VR experience resulted in significantly better recall of non-target objects. As this was found only for incidental recall, it suggests those with previous VR experience retained more information from the environment in general. The results suggest that immersion may have different impacts depending on type of information to be learned, and previous VR experience may improve performance on deeper learning tasks. These outcomes can be applied in the design of VEs and navigation tasks.