Non-native vs Native English Speakers User Experience in HMD vs Desktop Immersive Training

During previous years, researchers from TUKE (Technical University of Kosice) and MSU (Mississippi State University) collaborated on building a virtual immersive training environment for law enforcement officers. The training tool was designed for operation in Virtual Reality (VR) using HMD (Head Mounted Display) and 3D Desktop modes. The goal was to control a Jaguar V4 robot in a virtual environment using both joystick and voice commands, because not all functions could be accessed by hand controllers alone. The speech recognition was designed for English speakers. Firstly it was tested at MSU with five US participants and later the same tests were repeated with 16 students at TUKE, who were non-native English speakers. This article provides an overview of the experiment and a comparison of cognitive aspects and user acceptance levels resulted from these trials on different continents and different English speakers (native and non-native ones).