Usability, usefulness and ease of use in virtual reality training: an on-site evaluation with industrial workers

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining recognition in industrial training due to its safety, efficiency, and customizability. Moreover, it proves to maintain or improve the learning effect compared to more traditional learning methods. To further enhance the experience, the audiovisual dimension is often extended with haptic feedback. Moreover, the benefits of multi-user experiences such as improved knowledge, practical skills, teamwork, and team performance are often exploited. Despite the proven effectiveness of VR training and the availability of multi-user frameworks and haptic technology, the industrial adoption of this innovation remains far below its potential. Therefore, a better view on the relationship between specific design features and and according aspects of User Experience (UX) such as cognitive response, hesitance, uncertainty, and acceptance/rejection of the actual target group, i.e. industrial workers, is required. To address this research gap, this work presents an experimental methodology to address the impact of the system’s multi-modality and multi-user aspects on UX in an on-site environment. First, the multi-modal nature of VR is evaluated. To this end, a comparison is made between traditional VR controllers and haptic gloves in a fine-grained use case (dubbed as Fuse Box), with respect to ease of use (difficulty, naturalness, pleasantness, user-friendliness, and general experience), perceived usefulness, cybersickness, and usability. Second, the multi-user aspect is analyzed. Here, an evaluation is conducted on ease of use with respect to environment and interaction, perceived usefulness, cybersickness, and usability in a multi-user use case (dubbed as Warehouse). In addition, the influence of technical proficiency and prior VR experience is researched. The results show that industrial workers prefer traditional controllers for methodological tasks, but that they see the usefulness of haptic gloves for use cases in which specific physical actions are required. Furthermore, they also recognize the usefulness of VR training in general, although certain barriers need addressing, especially with regard to less experienced and technologically less proficient people.