Analysis of virtual reality technology applied in education

The use of virtual reality (VR) technology in training and education is an extension of 50 years of flight simulation research. As virtual reality becomes integrated into medical practices, the same questions that confronted the developers of flight simulation also apply to those in the medical domain. Does this technology work for training and education? If so, how well does it work? How much does it cost? Is it less expensive than the alternative training methods? In order to answer these questions the authors have taken a look at the same problems in the history of military simulation. The four techniques used to assess the value of military simulation have been, and still are, task analyses (a detailed, timed description of the actual tasks), standard experimental designs (i.e. the pre-test, post-test control group design), transfer-of-training experiments (where the evaluation metric is the actual task) and various combinations of the three. At present the only evaluation technique being used for VR in medical education is the task analysis.