Developing a Tutorial for Improving Usability and User Skills in an Immersive Virtual Reality Experience

Abstract

The fast development and progressive price reduction of Virtual Reality (VR) devices open a broad range of VR applications. Especially interesting are those applications focused on educational objectives. However, before these VR applications can be extensively presented in the educational system, some main issues to optimize their efficiency in the student’s autonomous learning process should be solved. While in non-VR games designers have consistently developed introductory tutorials to prepare new players for the game’s mechanics, in the case of VR, the design of these tutorials is still an open issue. This research presents a tutorial for VR educational applications to help the users to become familiar with the virtual environment and to learn the use of the interaction devices and the different mechanics within the experiences. In addition, the usability of this tutorial was tested with final users to assure its effectiveness.