Applying gamification to virtual reality

What is virtual reality?

Virtual reality (VR) technology is a set of tools that facilitate the simulation of real environments or virtual worlds. Users are able to move around, interact with objects, and even other users present in the same virtual world.

This technology is typically accessed through VR headsets and handsets. These immerse the player visually in the virtual world, and serve as the controls to allow them to interact with the experience.

While this is still quite advanced technology, it’s already finding its way onto the commercial market, albeit at a high price tag, a bit like artificial intelligence (AI). In time, as it becomes more accessible, and more advanced, it will start to be used in a growing number of applications and sectors. One such sector it has already proved to be a great match for is gamification.

What is gamification?

Gamification is the application of game mechanics to more humdrum tasks to improve user engagement. By making something into a game, you can motivate people by appealing to their desire for competition, or their hunger for a challenge. Gamifying business functions, corporate training, and education, is a great way to bring the best out of a person when applying themselves to less fun tasks.

Think about people ruining family board games when they get too competitive, or how intense pub quizzes can get. Even when a game is simple, everybody wants to win. Nobody wants to lose or come up short. That can be an incredibly motivating factor when it comes to improving learner engagement in challenging areas of training and education, such as learning a second language or a new system at work.

Virtual reality for training

Virtual reality, as well as augmented reality and digital learning, can be used to implement more advanced digital training projects for companies. Compared to other training methods, virtual reality training allows learners to progress more quickly, and to go into greater detail in their training. This particularly applies to skill development and practising things that require physical movements.

With the use of virtual reality, 360 degree virtual environments can be created for educational and training purposes. This means you could create training experiences that could be participated in remotely by home workers that are more immersive than in-person escape rooms. This is a major revolution in the field of study and learning, as it allows for a realistic simulation of a work or on-site environment, facilitating total immersion.

Through a virtual reality gaming experience tailored to different objectives, learners can practise skills in stressful and complex situations. The complexity of the simulation allows users to learn and perfect specific technical movements. This takes the scope of VR-enriched educational games from applying theory to suggested scenarios to the development of physical skills. This is a consequence-free simulation, so they can do so without mistakes mattering. Consider the advantages this would have for medical students practising surgery, or military special forces. Mistakes in those environments are so costly, a virtual reality alternative pays huge dividends. While less immersive, simulation-based digital training can go a long way in this regard, virtual reality allows gamified experiences to truly go the distance. It can deliver the next best thing to really practising an action or skill in the field.

The benefits of gamification and virtual reality

1. Increasing commitment and motivation through game mechanisms

The first and most obvious benefit of virtual reality applied to gamified training and education is increased engagement. This will apply to students in an educational environment, or employees in the workplace. Gamification challenges and encourages all learners to be more productive and give more of themselves to their training by being more fun and more engaging.

The virtual reality element essentially amplifies what more typical gamified training experiences can deliver because they completely close off distractions. The user almost has no choice but to give 100% of their attention to a gamified training experience using virtual reality. The total immersion and realistic graphics make it seem as if it’s really happening. It’s as insistent upon itself as reality, and can’t be ignored or tuned out.

2. Better conditioning and skill development through more realistic experiences

Virtual reality technology creates an immersive user experience that would be impossible to create in a real environment due to safety, cost, or realism. Virtual reality could be used to simulate scenarios in a way that is night and day compared to video and text aids. Consider following emergency procedures during a plane crash, or fixing equipment on the side of a shuttle in space. While the theory of these situations can be applied to an effective gamified training experience using more accessible game engines, virtual reality can flesh out the simulation to deliver on intangibles. Elements can be added to the experience to make it more realistic, like gravitational or atmospheric forces, visual impairment due to smoke, or vibrations if the game was recreating a war zone.

Through haptic feedback and powerful, 360-degree visuals, total immersion can be achieved. Stressors and elements of reality that are hard to replicate through text and video content can be added to induce previously unattainable realism in the user experience. Feelings like anxiety, stress, and excitement can be introduced to the game. This is incredibly useful because in almost no jobs are you performing your required tasks under perfect conditions. If you’re performing surgery, you’re against the clock, and may be dealing with complications that differ from the textbook. If you’re a soldier in a warzone, you’re not just fighting enemies, you’re dealing with complex political situations, potentially hard to identify threats, and you need to be cognizant of protecting innocent native populations.

Anyone can kick a ball into a goal, but doing it in a penalty shootout at the World Cup final with a professional, world class goalkeeper is a different matter. While copy and video content can give context to the task, virtual reality can induce the stress or excitement of doing it in realistic conditions.

3. Reducing the risk factor and encouraging learning through repeatability

This builds on advantage number 2. When you learn on the job in real life, sometimes you don’t get a second chance. If you do, you don’t get a second chance with all the same variables at play. It’s not necessarily as productive a learning experience. You’re not playing through an experience, then picking up where you went wrong last time, like you can with a virtual reality experience.

Various scenarios and stressful situations, such as accidents and emergencies, can be simulated through virtual reality. However, because everything is simulated, the learner risks nothing. VR-enriched gamified training content is essentially giving users simulated experience. Learners get the value of really being in the field, but none of the risk. It’s like when fighter pilots talk about simulated missions, or in astronaut training where for every minute of flight, they’ve put in hours of simulations. So much can go wrong if something’s a little off, it’s just more valuable to practise for every possible scenario. At some points, this level of detail and technology will be more broadly available for companies and educational institutions. Any student or employee participating in a virtual reality training course can continue to practise until they feel confident in mastering the process in question.

The learning module can be repeated until the learner masters the relevant skill. The learner or employee can train in complete safety, and practice as long as they, or their employer or education provider see fit. This allows them to learn from their mistakes and improve their performance.

4. An effective and renewable experience

Virtual reality-enriched gamified learning helps students to develop their skills faster and more effectively, as they are placed in a virtual environment similar to their workplace and the tasks they have to perform on a daily basis. However, businesses evolve, and so do the challenges they face. Subjects evolve as new understandings come to light through research. To stay relevant, learning materials need to be updated inline with the latest information.

Once you have acquired the tools of virtual reality, you can adjust the content and topics to suit your employees or students. The strategy must then be developed over the long term, and regularly updated and perfected according to the evolution of your objectives. It is the repeated use of gamification that allows you to improve at implementing it, and the same is true when gamified projects are enriched with virtual reality.

When the game world merges with virtual reality

Gamification has multiple benefits for your project: entertainment, interactivity, quick feedback, capitalising on positive user emotions, and user autonomy. When gamification is combined with virtual reality, the true possibilities of gamification can be realised. For sci-fi and comic book fans, yes, this is Star Trek’s Holodeck or X-Men’s Danger Room becoming realities.

New and exciting technology like augmented reality and virtual reality open up all new possibilities when it comes to creating gamified experiences. Although virtual reality is still in its infancy, there is no doubt that it will become an integral part of the digital learning and training process as a key link between theory and practice. Games, often designed to entertain, are now increasingly becoming tools for learning and interaction.

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