If you want someone to remember something, you have to make them care about it. In VR, we have control over someone’s senses, so better placed to affect emotional states, whether it’s creating excitement, curiosity or perhaps a healthy bit of trepidation.

To move new information from short-term to long-term memory, learners need to start actively doing something with it, preferably applying it to real-world situations, as soon as possible. VR enables the possibilities of theory and practice, layering up knowledge acquisition and application, hand in hand rather than separating.

VR uniquely offers the chance to practice in a realistic replica of the real-world environment and fail safely, with repetition and without incurring cost, until getting it right. This gives the learner confidence but more importantly helps lessen the cognitive load, requiring less mental gymnastics to take the new information and conceptualising using it in the real world.