Abstract This study investigated how participation in a minimalistic immersive virtual reality (IVR) simulation influenced adult participants’ attunement and task progress. Training practitioners and prior studies have suggested that insufficient adaptation to IVR usage may hinder progress in immersive training experiences. We examined the actualised events of multiple playtest situations. We transcribed and analysed participant-simulation, intra-simulation, and social situation dynamics from video recordings of 60 participants’ practical experimentation with the simulation featuring an initial adaptation period and a procedural assembly task. We created a materials-driven evaluation rubric to assess their adaptation to IVR usage (extended action fluency and navigation tendencies). We then compared the participants’ adaptation stage groups and shifts in temporal profiles before and after the procedural assembly task. The results suggested that adaptation to IVR usage was a continuous process. Furthermore, insufficient adaptation emerged in the form of specific disturbances, such as running into the game area’s boundaries, rigid object rotation, and object collisions. We noticed that the participants’ “virtual desire paths” deviated from the developer-intended pathway for task progress. We reported on progress-enabling actions and described progress-complicating disturbances. Finally, we leveraged the facilitators’ successful advice in mapping out a success structure for the procedural assembly task. As it turned out, numerous other elements besides insufficient adaptation disrupted the simulation’s dynamics. Most of the improvements suggested focused on the simulation’s design, development, and delivery of instructions and reality representation. The evaluation rubric remains reconfigurable and the implications require further empirical and practical evaluation in diverse contexts.
Laine et al. (Sat,) studied this question.